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:
pmxcfs
, a database-driven file system, for storing configuration
files, replicated in real-time on all nodes using corosync