I used Proxmox Datacenter Manager with my PVE nodes

Contrary to what you’d expect from a platform designed for home servers, Proxmox has fairly minimal system requirements – to the point where it’s possible to convert any old machine into a reliable PVE node. In fact, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks turning ancient laptops – systems I’d otherwise consider e-waste – into reliable Proxmox-based LXC-hosting servers.

But my latest Proxmox escapades have brought a new issue into light: I have no way of managing the entire battalion of PVE nodes running in my home lab. Luckily for folks such as myself, Proxmox Datacenter Manager is a utility purposely designed to help keep track of PVE nodes. Now that I’ve started using it, I can confirm that Proxmox Datacenter Manager has plenty of perks and quirks, and here’s a quick log of my experience with the tool.

What’s the point of running Proxmox Datacenter Manager?

Great for home labs with multiple PVE nodes

If you’re an ace Proxmox user, you might already be familiar with the concept of clusters. Even without setting up shared storage and high-availability provisions, Proxmox lets you connect multiple nodes and access them from a common UI. Unfortunately, this setup has a couple of problems that I’ve witnessed first-hand while working on my experiments.

For starters, Proxmox doesn’t play well when you’ve got LXCs and VMs running on your non-central nodes. Sure, you could back everything up, delete the virtual guests on the nodes you wish to pair with the primary server, and restore the LXCs and VMs after linking them together. But doing so is kind of a pain when you’ve already got fully-configured Proxmox rigs running dozens of services.

Then there’s the quorum part of the equation. If the number of nodes operational is less than the minimum amount required to maintain a quorum, you’ll have trouble getting the rest of the machines working.

Thankfully, Proxmox Datacenter Manager is free from these issues. I tend to use my dual Xeon workstation, old Ryzen PC, a TerraMaster NAS, and some mini-PCs to run distinct services – without a cluster setup, and Proxmox Datacenter Manager makes it easy to keep tabs on each device. Of course, I’ve also set up three older systems in a cluster, just to get familiar with clustering for my DevOps journey, and Proxmox’s centralized server management utility integrates just as well with this setup.

On that subject, Proxmox Datacenter Manager’s UI lets me monitor quite a few statistics, ranging from the servers’ resource utilization and cluster health to LXC/VM count and usage metrics. Plus, it also lets me access the web UI for each node directly, which is quite useful because I was having trouble identifying each node just from its icon on my Homepage dashboard.

Migration works better than I expected

While the ability to keep an eye on my servers and access them from a unified interface is great, being able to migrate virtual machines between any nodes with the press of a button is what really attracted me to Proxmox Datacenter Manager. You see, I tend to run most experimental LXCs and VMs on my primary workstation, and if they prove extremely useful (like Netbox and Beszel), I deploy them on my mini-PC, so I won’t have to deal with the aftermath of accidentally breaking them in a future experiment.

Thankfully, Proxmox Datacenter Manager’s migration facility works pretty well – at least, for the most part. I tried moving some LXCs from my old PC to another system, and the migration process failed initially. Turns out, the snapshots created by the Ultimate Proxmox Updater were the root of the error, and deleting them got rid of the problem. Likewise, I managed to offload some useful VMs from my cluster to the same node without encountering any issues.

Unfortunately, I tried offloading some virtual guests from my workstation to a cluster node, and the process would fail because of some VID errors – even after I’d made certain that none of the cluster nodes had virtual machines with the same ID as the one I wanted to migrate. Nevertheless, that was a minor inconvenience, as I was able to transfer the virtualized services to a separate node in the cluster.

It’s pretty easy to set up

Adding nodes is just as simple

Perhaps this is just the experience I’ve accumulated after working on Proxmox for months, but the entire setup procedure was a cakewalk. For the initial test, I wanted to keep things simple by going the bare-metal route instead of virtualizing Proxmox Datacenter Manager. So, I inserted a flash drive containing the ISO on my Radxa X4, switched its boot order, and arrived at the installation wizard. The overall UI was reminiscent of the Proxmox Virtual Environment installer, and after choosing the disk, hostname, and network settings, the setup process was finished without a hitch.

The web UI for accessing the Proxmox Datacenter Manager instance appeared after a quick restart, and the next step was adding the nodes. Proxmox Datacenter Manager requires both the IP address and fingerprint of the PVE system. For the latter, I entered the pvenode cert info command within the Shell tab of each Proxmox node and copied the fingerprint field. Afterward, I entered their ID, credentials, and authentication method, and the nodes appeared in the web UI.

Still, it’s not battle-ready just yet

I wouldn’t call it a vCenter killer in its current state

So far, I’ve gone over the perks of Proxmox Datacenter Manager, but it’s not quite a finished product at the moment. If you run as many (potentially destructive) experiments as I do, you’ll be disappointed that the utility can’t pull notifications from Proxmox nodes. It’s also not compatible with Proxmox Backup Server, and there’s no way to tinker with the SDN settings from its UI.

All that said, I’m fairly optimistic about the platform. Given that Proxmox Datacenter Manager is still in its early access, it’s bound to incorporate many features throughout its development, and I’m happy to wait patiently until the team at Proxmox perfects this neat vCenter alternative.