Why Proxmox is not production-ready for larger deployments (Part 2: The Game Of (Maybe?) Death)

Whoever claims you shouldn’t play games at work apparently never heard about “Guess What’s Running?” – surprisingly immersive experience, given the poor graphics performance, not requiring even the cheapest GPU.

But it can suck whole office crew into silent, breathless awe.

The interface is simple, very clear, even a bit boring. Consists mostly of grey circles covering everything on your VM list, what used to be green a moment ago.
The perfect Schroedinger Cluster, dead and alive at the same time.

The villain is one PVESTATD, absolute drama queen, armed with the tantrum-loaded machine gun that fires question marks with reckless abandon. This daemon (pun intended) waits patiently for the most critical moment to strike. Disconnected storage? Migration-caused network overload? Running backups? Replication? Bad mood of any of Greek gods? PVESTATD is there, just give him a reason.

The Mechanics of the Game

  1. The Panic Phase: VMs vanish from status reporting. Phones start ringing. Questions no one can answer.
  2. The Blame Game Phase: Network team blames storage. Storage team blames virtualization. Everyone blames the last person who touched the system.
  3. The “Actually Everything Is Fine” Phase: Discovering all VMs are actually running perfectly despite their questionable status icons.
  4. systemctl restart pvestatd pveproxy: Executing and praying for the status icons get green before anyone important notices.

Why PVESTATD Throws Its Infamous Tantrums

  • Resource Starvation: Feed it too little RAM, and watch it collapse under the weight of status checking.
  • Network Congestion: Force it to communicate through crowded network paths, and it will simply give up in protest.
  • Database Drama: Its precious cluster database gets locked or corrupted, and PVESTATD responds by dramatically fainting.
  • File Descriptor Limits: Like a hoarder running out of shelf space, it simply cannot keep track of one more open file.
  • Zombie Apocalypse: Dead processes refuse to die properly, haunting PVESTATD until it loses its mind.

The Arsenal of Defense

  • Resource Allocation: Large clusters get split into manageable domains. No more “one cluster to rule them all” fantasy architectures.
  • Network Segregation: 2 (yes, TWO! ) dedicated networks for cluster communication. Migrations, transfers, backups etc. separated from cluster communication
  • Database Maintenance: Regular check-ups for the cluster database. A healthy database is a happy database. Oh, you didn’t know theres a database? It SQLite based corosync plugin living in /var/lib/pve-cluster – a custom solution known as pmxcfs (Proxmox Cluster Filesystem)
    Description shortened for brevity
  • Limit Expansion: File descriptor limits get boosted. ulimit to the rescue

For details and commands consult your favorite LLM. At Euronodes we thankfully implemented it long time ago, so I’m not really up to date with the details

The Unwinnable Level

The true challenge comes with scale. Enterprise deployments with hundreds of VMs across dozens of nodes create the perfect storm. PVESTATD wasn’t designed for this level of operation, yet administrators keep pushing the boundaries.

The game reaches its final boss level when management demands enterprise-grade reliability from a system that cannot collect itself. That’s when players realize some games weren’t meant to be won – just survived.

So next time grey question marks bloom across a Proxmox dashboard, gather the IT team around to enjoy this thrilling multiplayer experience. The graphics may be simple, but the adrenaline rush is real.

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