I have advocated using on the metal virtualization and placing Zentyal on a virtual machine here in the past. Today I was very glad that I do that at home as well as work (at least in the past --- I took a new position for those that keep up with such things)
It started out innocent enough, I realized that I had not updated the home server from 3.0 to 3.2 as I thought I had some months back. I decided to use the UPGRADE NOW button on the dashboard. That button would be more accurately labeled "BREAK IT NOW" but that is another story. Long story short after 45 minutes or so of wrangling with the system I decided to restore from the nightly backup set (Proxmox image).
I shutdown the virtual machine (forced it off actually)
Selected the backup tab for the VM
Selected the last image taken
Pressed Restore
Within 441 seconds I was starting my 32 Gig sized VM and was back to normal within a few minutes. This process would have been much longer if I had been running a physical server. To give some scale to this my home server backup file is 19G in size. The same file for 150 or so users w/email is about 112G. That means that the larger system could be restored in about 40 minutes presuming the superior disk performance of the work system didn't improve that time.
Now that I have taken a position with Rackspace (I start in January) I plan on investigating topics like moving from a Proxmox server to an Openstack and back again. I know that Zentyal performs well under openstack since the Zentyal development team uses Openstack internally. Maybe I will find out how well it runs on an all SSD raid10 arrangement :-) .
Topic: Why I use Proxmox for my servers (Read 1929 times)