Building a Proxmox Test Cluster in VirtualBox Part 5: Shit Happened; Lessons Were Learned

Jesus, it’s been almost a year since I posted part 1 of this series.

Hacking stuff is one of the ways that I cope with depression. Like going to the gym and getting stronger, learning new skills is a productive activity that improves my mind and my career. Also like going to the gym, hacking stuff requires a certain level of energy and focus. When I am having a depressive episode, I just can’t make myself do much more than watch TV. I have emerged from my Fallout 4 binge and I am eager to get this hardware cluster off the ground.

Learning Lessons

In my pursuit of a working Virtual Box + Proxmox cluster (Boxmox? ProxBox? BoxProx!) I discovered a few fatal flaws:

• My testbed is a single laptop, and I used static IP’s that sat on my internal wireless network.
• That meant that I could hack and demo the cluster at home, but not out in the world, like at Cinci2600.
• Ergo, the “Management interface sitting on the internal network” question that I excluded from the exercise should not have been excluded.
• Thus, the laptop-based lab for this project was missing a few things:
  1. 3 “Host Only” networks for the management interface, cluster network, and migration network.
  2. A router VBVM to route traffic bound for the Internet via a NAT interface.
  3. A management workstation VBVM with a GUI, for managing the router and the BoxProx CLI and UI.

The reason that I have been doing all of this in Virtual Box, is because it’s easy to recover from these sorts of mistakes. You can think of this exercise as the “Lab Before The Lab”, or the development phase, before going to an actual hardware lab. I actually gave up on keeping my lab environment separate from my home network because I was always limited by one thing or another. At this point, it’s as much lab as it is production, pretty much everywhere.

Shit Happening
Another component of this exercise that I have not documented is the redesign of my home/lab network to accommodate the new cluster. The old “cluster” is down to two old Proxmox servers that aren’t clustered together. It works for getting shit done for the family (PBX, Plex, Bittorrent, OpenVPN, etc.) but it’s not optimal, nor is the network sufficiently segregated to my satisfaction. So, as I have been doing this, I have also been upgrading the home network and learning more about things like VLANs.

So, the material of the first 4 parts of the series is valid, I just wanted to include the router and workstation bits, which you will probably only need if you want your lab to be portable, and work on wireless networks other than your home.

Modification to the network design

In the first installment, I recommended using a bridged adapter for the management interface. This worked great at home, but once I went anywhere else, the wheels fell off the whole process. I tried things like adding a static IP to my wireless adapter in Windows, and I came to the conclusion that Windows just doesn’t do virtual networking like it’s supposed to.

So, when you build your PVE hosts, use 3 host only networks, and use a router VM to connect the cluster to the Internet. Also be sure to disable the DHCP service on all of your host-only networks, like so:

The router

I know I have made simple routers from Debian VMs but for this experiment I spent a fair amount of time in the weeds. So do yourself a favor and just use PFSense. Yes it’s waaaay overkill for what you want to use it for, but it will route packets between two networks with minimal configuration, and that’s really what you want.

1. Put the first interface of the PFSense VM on a NAT network.
2. Make sure to disable the DHCP server on your host-only network interfaces.
3. Put the second interface for the PFSense VM on the FIRST host-only network interface.



4. Once you have the VBVM booted up, configure the WAN interface on the NIC that was configured by DHCP, and the LAN interface on the other NIC.
5. Using the console on the router VBVM, configure the LAN for DHCP. Use a small address pool because there will probably be only one DHCP client ever. Using DHCP is an easy way to make sure that you are looking at the right NIC/virtual network.



6. I can tell you from experience that if you find yourself twiddling with PFSense settings, you are doing it wrong. Just factory reset the config and move on. This is a BoxProx lab, not a PFSense lab.

The Workstation

Ok, so now you have a small network on host-only adapter 1, and router that connects it to the NAT network on your computer. All these NATs make the cluster network portable, but all but useless for anything else. That’s fine. All you want at this point is for your Linux workstation VBVM to access the Internet despite the fact that its only network interface is sitting on a host-only network.

For the management workstation, you don’t need more than a browser and an SSH client, so literally any distro will work for you. I am a Debian guy, so when I want a no-frills GUI workstation with zero time spent configuring, I use one of the Ubuntu breeds meant for low end computers, like Lubuntu or Ubuntu Mate.

Regardless of the distro, you will be doing some repetitive typing in SSH. On Windows, I recommended MobaXTerm so you can type into multiple terminals at the same time and feel like a super hacker. In the Linux world, the app that you want to use is called “Terminator”. Like everything else on this blog, there is way more to Terminator that I won’t bother with. Just know that you can split your term into two equal parts horizontally and vertically by right clicking, and you can turn on and turn off broadcasting to all your keystrokes by pressing ALT+A and ALT+O respectively. Sorry Terminator/TMux/TWM fans, but I got shit to do.

This phase of the lab is a success if you can boot your Linux VBVM and use a browser to access Google as well as the web UIs for PFSense. You are now free to begin the lab again from Part 1.