Chapter 5. Cluster Manager

The Proxmox VE cluster manager pvecm is a tool to create a group of physical servers. Such a group is called a cluster. We use the Corosync Cluster Engine for reliable group communication. There’s no explicit limit for the number of nodes in a cluster. In practice, the actual possible node count may be limited by the host and network performance. Currently (2021), there are reports of clusters (using high-end enterprise hardware) with over 50 nodes in production.

pvecm can be used to create a new cluster, join nodes to a cluster, leave the cluster, get status information, and do various other cluster-related tasks. The Proxmox Cluster File System (“pmxcfs”) is used to transparently distribute the cluster configuration to all cluster nodes.

Grouping nodes into a cluster has the following advantages: