Resolved Plesk Performance in Proxmox VE

[speedbird]

I recently came across the idea to get a new server and run Promox on it (www.proxmox.com) in order to provide the usual Plesk Server to my client and on top be able to provide additional services on separate VMs as necessary.

So here I'm looking for people who already work with Proxmox and have experience with the general performance.

I have roughly 30 clients on my plesk server right now, generating around 10.000 page hits per day. MySQL database is around 8.5GB in size in total. As of right now, I run my setup on a 4C/8T XEON CPU with 32Gigs of RAM and 2x512GB NVMe SSDs and I want to use a similar setup for the new project.

I plan on using KVM so each machine is isolated from the host as much as possible. How much of a performance penalty will I have to face in day to day usage of the server? What do you guys run your Plesk VM on and how does it perform?

Right now, my current setup is fast as lightning and I don't want to end up with a slow service.

All comments and hints are greatly appreciated.

 

[Daniel Slyman]

Hey,

I am using Proxmox on this

Intel Xeon E3-1245V2
4x HDD 3.0 TB SATA Enterprise
4x RAM 8192 MB DDR ECC
NIC 1000Mbit (Intel 82574L)

And I have one VPS with Centos 7.4 and Plesk Onyx, running 20 clients with somewhat the same hits and database size as you. So far I am having no issues whatsoever and performance runs smoothly. On the websites I optimized I get 100/100 on Google PageSpeed and 100/100 on GTMetrix, mostly WordPress instances.

If there are any performance penalties, I'd say they are pretty negligible.

 

[speedbird]

That sounds great. Do you run LXC or KVM? Do you have all resources allocated to your Plesk VM and do you run other VMs on the side?

 

[Daniel Slyman]

I am running KVM (same isolation desires as you), it's running with 8 cores and 16GB of RAM. Apart from the Plesk VM there is an ERPNext VM, one with Plex, one with Pydio, one with Cloudron and a few testing VMs which are all running simultaneously without a problem. I was also running a dedicated server with Plesk before and I have to say, if everything goes south, it's great to have another level of administration above the server you're running Plesk on. While updating to Centos 7.4 I actually had to mount the Plesk VM disk image onto the Proxmox server to modify some files. Also Proxmox has a pretty neat administration GUI so you're unlikely to regret this move.

 

[speedbird]

Alright, sounds perfect then. I really like the idea of being able to take a snapshot before making major changes or updates... just in case. Do you run with ZFS or did you choose to put everything onto ext4? I read a lot about ZFS recently while researching proxmox and so far it seems to be kind of a pain in the...... to get it running with good performance.

So far I never had any problems with ext4 performance and I take it that proxmox allows snapshots to be taken on ext4 as well.

I think your statements pushed me into the direction of really doing this switch. Do you have any kind of useful information on how to harden proxmox despite the ususal fail2ban, move ssh port stuff and so on? I thought about putting a pfsense in front of everything but since that would only be another VM, I kind of hesitate doing this because ultimately in a failure condition this would lock me out of my network entirely.

Thank you very much so far for your input!

 

[Daniel Slyman]

I've put everything onto ext4, I tend to keep things a simple as possible and put more emphasis on stability over performance since the differences don't really merit the effort. But maybe I'm lazy.

Yes, the snapshot function works flawlessly and without needing to power down the VM at all.

Well, I just took the easiest route and made the server on which Proxmox runs inaccessible from the outside except from the OpenVPN port which means that you will only be able to access SSH and the WebGUI if you're logged onto the server via OpenVPN.

Use either of these two scripts to set that up:
GitHub - Nyr/openvpn-install: OpenVPN road warrior installer for Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS
GitHub - Angristan/OpenVPN-install: Improved OpenVPN installer for Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS and Arch Linux

I found this to be the easiest solution, and arguably the safest, in terms of hardening the server since you don't need to worry about much thereafter.

Obviously you'd need to keep your OpenVPN profiles secure and store them reliably. I host with Hetzner and they have an emergency system which can be booted from the client backend, so if I would ever lock myself out I'd get back in by booting that up and removing the firewalld rules. Obviously at the cost of downtime for all VMs.

Keep in mind that setting up Proxmox networking is quite a hassle and time consuming the first time around, but there is plenty of documentation around which can aid you with that.

You are more than welcome, glad to help.

 

[bulent]

Keep in mind that setting up Proxmox networking is quite a hassle and time consuming the first time around, but there is plenty of documentation around which can aid you with that.

You are more than welcome, glad to help.

Hi,
I had some trouble setting up the network with proxmox, the VM wasn't able to access intInter. What would you suggest me to check?

Regards