SOLTECSIS

Talk on DRP with Proxmox and Ceph – ASLAN 2025

Matias Bejar — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 07:11:29 +0000

During the ASLAN 2025 event, our colleague Víctor Rodríguez, an expert in virtualization, high availability, and official Proxmox trainer, gave a technical talk focused on the importance of having an effective Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) using open source technologies like Proxmox VE, Ceph, and Proxmox Backup Server. In his session, Víctor covered multiple real-world scenarios that can impact IT service continuity and how to stay ahead of them with well-configured tools and a solid recovery strategy.

Below, we go over the key points covered in his presentation.

What is a DRP and Why Is It Essential?

If you’ve been managing systems and networks for a while, you’ve probably experienced some unfortunate events:

Human errors.
Hardware failures at critical moments.
Infrastructure breakdowns.
Cybersecurity incidents.

That’s exactly why having a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is essential. This plan helps us anticipate problems by defining clear actions to prevent or respond to incidents.

You can think of it like an insurance policy: we invest resources hoping never to need it. But beware — a disaster doesn’t have to be massive. Something as simple as accidentally deleting a file in a VM can turn into a disaster if we don’t have a proper backup.

There’s always a first time, even for those extremely unlikely things that “have never happened to anyone” and end up causing serious damage… It’s literally impossible to foresee absolutely everything, especially when it comes to human error or cybersecurity.

When talking about a DRP, there are several key terms we need to understand:

Recovery Point Objective (RPO): the amount of data we could lose, measured in time.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO): the amount of time the system can remain down while we recover it.
Working Recovery Time (WRT): the time needed to verify that the recovered system works properly.
Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD): the sum of RTO and WRT.

The target values for each of these times depend on business needs and the level of investment in the DRP: the closer we aim for these values to be 0, the more resources we’ll need to invest to achieve that goal.

DRP with Proxmox VE: The Ideal Solution

What Are Proxmox VE, PBS, and Ceph?

In case anyone is not yet familiar with them, here’s a brief introduction to the key tools we’ll use to implement our Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP):

Proxmox VE (PVE): An open-source virtualization platform that allows you to manage virtual machines (VMs) and LXC containers. It includes many useful features for implementing a DRP.
Proxmox Backup Server (PBS): An efficient, deduplicated, and secure integrated backup system. It’s Proxmox’s native backup solution, fully integrated with PVE.
Ceph: A distributed and redundant storage system that brings hyperconvergence to a PVE cluster, with no single points of failure.

Typical Scenarios and Solutions

Next, we’ll present a series of situations that can arise in any IT environment — from human errors and critical infrastructure failures to cybersecurity issues. We’ll look at how to tackle them effectively using the tools we’ve just mentioned.

1. Preventing Human Errors

In many cases, incidents are not caused by technical failures but by human actions. A typical example is granting users excessive permissions in Proxmox VE, which can lead to critical situations such as accidentally shutting down or even deleting virtual machines.

What options does Proxmox VE offer?

Proxmox VE offers a very granular access control system, allowing you to precisely define who can do what within the platform. It also supports multiple authentication backends and allows for two-factor authentication (2FA), which adds an extra layer of security to permission management.

The solution is to implement a proper permissions scheme — that’s how we avoid “disaster.”

This way, we can aim for a RPO = 0 and RTO = 0

Please, don’t give root permissions to everyone!

2. Switch Failure

One of the switches providing connectivity to our Proxmox VE cluster fails, leaving several nodes without network access.

What options does Proxmox VE offer?

Proxmox VE supports various link aggregation modes, including LACP 802.3ad, to provide redundancy and increase network access capacity. With proper switches and correct configurations (stack or MLAG), we can prevent a switch failure from affecting the service.

With the right configuration, we can achieve a RPO = 0 and RTO = 0

There’s no point in designing a cluster with multiple nodes, redundancy, etc., if we don’t give the same importance to the network. It’s essential to use redundant switches in a stack or MLAG setup and connect our Proxmox VE servers to at least two switches.

3. Host Disk Failure

One of the disks in a server fails, compromising local storage.

What options does Proxmox VE offer?

Proxmox VE allows for redundancy without the need for RAID controllers. We can use ZFS with mirror or RAIDz, or Ceph to distribute and replicate data across multiple nodes in the cluster.

The solution is to use ZFS to install the operating system and also to host our virtual machines. However, whenever possible, it’s recommended to use Ceph, as it allows VM data to be distributed across at least three disks located on three different hosts in the cluster.

In both cases, high availability of storage is achieved, resulting in a RTO = 0 and RPO = 0

Use a mirror for the disks where you install Proxmox VE!
Use Ceph to avoid the SPOF (Single Point of Failure) that comes with using a single storage array.
You do lose redundancy until the failed disk is replaced: if the mirror is made up of 2 disks, a second disk failure will cause downtime!
If there are enough disks in the cluster, Ceph automatically restores redundancy.

4. Host Failure

A server breaks down or stops responding.

What options does Proxmox VE offer?

In this case, we consider two different aspects:

Data availability

With ZFS, it’s possible to set up periodic replication between cluster nodes, allowing VM disk redundancy. In contrast, Ceph maintains real-time data replication distributed across multiple nodes.

Execution availability

In Proxmox VE, we have HA (High Availability). For any VMs configured with HA, the cluster will automatically start them on another host within ~2 minutes. We’ll use Ceph whenever possible to take advantage of its real-time replication. If we’re working with ZFS, we’ll set up periodic replication for the VMs that require it.

With ZFS

RPO depends on the replication interval and RTO is around 2 minutes plus the VM boot time.

With Ceph

RPO is 0 and RTO is around 2 minutes, plus the VM boot time.

Yes, if the host goes down, the VMs it was running will stop abruptly, so the VM’s file system might need repair and some data could be lost.
Since Proxmox VE is multimaster, all hosts have the full configuration
You can define on which nodes you want them to run, among other things.

5. We Experience a Cybersecurity Incident

We detect a ransomware attack compromising the integrity of several of our virtual machines, putting both data and service continuity at risk.

What Options Does Proxmox VE Offer?

QEMU Dirty Bitmap allows us to perform frequent backups of our virtual machines with minimal load on the infrastructure, providing better protection for our VMs.

If we are using Ceph, there is an option to “pause” the entire storage system, helping to contain the damage.

Through the API, we can integrate SIEM tools to automatically perform actions upon detecting certain events: shutting down VMs, pausing Ceph operations, activating firewall rules within Proxmox VE…

It is also possible to implement automatic snapshots to further reduce RPO and RTO.

Applied Solution:

Perform frequent backups of our VMs.
Use SIEM tools to monitor activity within the VMs.
Ensure the ability to react quickly to these events (and, as a last resort, be ready to “pull the plug”).
Plan to have backups stored outside your main infrastructure — offline backups are crucial.

RPO and RTO will depend on the strategy used: with snapshots, they’re very low (around 1 minute), while with backups only, they vary more and are usually medium or high—depending on the backup frequency, hardware, and available network.

6. Datacenter-Level Tolerance with PBS

We Want to Provide Datacenter-Level Redundancy and Can Tolerate High RPO/RTO

What options does Proxmox PBS offer?

In a secondary data center, different from the main one, we use a remote PBS server with a replica of the backups made on the PBS in the main data center. Since we can have both PVE and PBS on the same host, if properly sized, we can run certain virtual machines on this PBS host. This can be useful for:

Running the most important VMs in the alternate data center in case of disaster.
Starting VMs and performing security audits in a network completely isolated from Production, but with connectivity between the VMs as if they were in the main cluster.
Periodically verifying that our DRP actually works and that we can restore our VMs and their applications will function properly.

The solution is to implement a local backup policy along with remote replication using Proxmox Backup Server (PBS). It’s essential to regularly verify that the backups are working correctly by performing restores on the remote PBS. Additionally, the full DRP must be defined, including all the necessary steps to bring up the VMs and applications in the alternate data center.

RTO:

Depends on the backup frequency and the synchronization speed between the main PBS and the remote PBS.

RPO:

Depends on the hardware and network capacity, but the times are generally medium to high.

Size your local and remote PBS according to your RPO/RTO requirements.
Host your remote PBS in reliable data centers that, if needed, can quickly provide you with PVE servers to run more VMs.
You could have Layer 2 connectivity between data centers using SDN integrated with PVE.
If the alternate data center is used in the event of a disaster, you may need to update DNS, use BGP, or cloud load balancers to ensure your applications remain accessible from the Internet.

7. Datacenter-Level Tolerance with Ceph

We want to provide redundancy at the data center level, but we require the lowest possible RPO/RTO.

What options does Ceph offer?

There are two possible approaches, both using Ceph:

Ceph replication between PVE clusters: we can have two PVE + Ceph clusters in separate data centers, with no distance limitations. Writes made on the VMs in the main data center are replicated to the remote data center. This can be done almost in real time or periodically.
By using 3 data centers—two with a PVE Ceph cluster and a third acting as a witness—we can enable Ceph Stretched Cluster mode. In this setup, all writes are done in “real” time on both PVE Ceph clusters.

RPO and RTO fully depend on the network infrastructure, the I/O requirements of the VMs, the storage hardware, and so on. These are options with strict requirements to ensure proper operation, with Ceph Stretched Cluster mode being by far the most demanding.

Other Useful Alternatives

Renting servers from OVH, where we are a reference integrator for Proxmox products.

OVH even offers 3AZ regions with three datacenters located at optimal distances to set up a geographically distributed cluster.

Application-level tolerance: in some cases, it’s more convenient to provide high availability at the application level instead of relying solely on infrastructure—or by combining both approaches. For example, MySQL Galera Cluster, HAProxy, Keepalived, PostgreSQL + Patroni, etc.

Conclusion

Proxmox VE, PBS, and Ceph together form a solid and flexible solution for implementing an effective Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) tailored to different business needs.

And the best part — it’s all 100% Open Source!

If you would like more information or personalized advice, feel free to contact us at: info@soltecsis.com

La entrada Talk on DRP with Proxmox and Ceph – ASLAN 2025 se publicó primero en SOLTECSIS.

SOLTECSIS – Partner of the Year 2025 by OVHcloud

Carles — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 12:01:10 +0000

We are 2025 Partner of the Year of OVHcloud!!!

Last Thursday, June 5th, we took part in the Backstage25 event organised by OVHcloud in Madrid, at the Florida Park venue in El Retiro Park.

Our CEO Carles Xavier Munyoz Baldó took part in the round table dedicated to hyperconvergence, where he spoke about how the Proxmox VE ecosystem from Proxmox Server Solutions, combined with the bare-metal services from OVHcloud, enables the creation of hyperconverged cloud clusters for virtualisation based on Proxmox VE and Ceph technology. In addition, these platforms support backup and DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) solutions and make use of the 3-AZ region to create highly resilient and fault-tolerant virtualisation platforms.

The event kicked off with great energy thanks to a spectacular batucada, very much in line with what OVHcloud usually delivers at this kind of event.

Our on-stage participation took place during the round table on hyperconvergence.

We were asked the following questions:

SOLTECSIS is specialised in Proxmox. Carles, could you tell us what value Soltecsis offers to its clients?

First of all, EXPERIENCE and PROFESSIONALISM.

Our company was founded in 2008, the same year the first version of Proxmox VE was released. Since then, we’ve been working with Proxmox, experimenting and learning with each new version, which has given us 17 years of experience in Proxmox solutions of various types and scales.
We are the only GOLD PARTNER IN SPAIN and the only OFFICIAL TRAINER IN SPANISH, which makes us the reference partner not only in Spain, but also in all Spanish-speaking countries.

Secondly, a MAJOR COST REDUCTION, across all levels (hardware, licences, deployment, maintenance, etc.), and most importantly, WITHOUT SACRIFICING TECHNOLOGY.

Use case: This week we completed the migration of a large multinational with a presence in 12 countries. Their previous virtualisation solution was based on Blade servers, 8 blades, disk enclosure, etc. A very expensive solution in terms of hardware. We deployed a three-node hyperconverged virtualisation cluster with Proxmox VE Ceph, using a mesh network, which lowers network hardware costs, no RAID controller needed, major licence cost reductions, etc.
With the new virtualisation infrastructure, Windows virtual machines that used to take minutes to boot NOW BOOT IN 5 SECONDS.

What advantages does OVHcloud offer when deploying Proxmox-based hyperconverged virtualisation?

The word that best defines these advantages is: VERSATILITY

– We can deploy Proxmox-based hyperconverged virtualisation clusters using OVH bare-metal services in the same way we would in an on-premises installation.

– We can easily scale our cluster by adding new servers with just a few clicks, or even completely upgrade our physical servers with new ones without ever having to interrupt the virtualisation service.

– We can make use of the 3-AZ REGION, improving the resilience of our cluster.

– We can set up BACKUPS with PBS in other data centres or countries.

– Various DRP options, for example, with real-time replication in other data centres, allowing recovery by moving public IPs through vRACK.

At the end of the gala, the awards ceremony took place, and to our great surprise, we were nominated and won in the Partner of the Year 2025 category.

Many thanks to the event organisers and all the staff at OVHcloud for your warmth, kindness, and the outstanding treatment you always give us.

La entrada SOLTECSIS – Partner of the Year 2025 by OVHcloud se publicó primero en SOLTECSIS.

2024 – SME Innovation Projects (INNOVA-CV)

Carles — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 19:10:22 +0000

SOLTECSIS SOLUCIONES TECNOLOGICAS, S.L. has carried out the project entitled “Innovation in the FWCloud Application: Boosting Security with AI and Advanced Management of VyOS Devices,” funded by the Valencian Institute of Business Competitiveness (IVACE) and included within the SME INNOVATION PROJECTS (INNOVA-CV) grant program, within the InnovaTEIC Innovation initiative, with funding from the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (€55,443.73).

The project aims to develop software that improves the FWCloud platform, incorporating new technologies and advanced functionalities to optimize firewall management. This project will introduce Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance system security by analyzing security policy scripts before applying them to the firewall, in order to identify potential vulnerabilities. Additionally, the ability to manage VyOS devices directly from the FWCloud console will be implemented, providing more efficient centralized management. Additionally, the installation process will continue to be optimized through the use of DMB and RPM repositories, and new plugins will be integrated to further simplify system service management. This approach will allow users to manage their firewall environments more securely and efficiently, utilizing the most advanced security and network management technologies.

La entrada 2024 – SME Innovation Projects (INNOVA-CV) se publicó primero en SOLTECSIS.

Subsidy granted by the Ministry of Innovation, Industry, Trade and Tourism

Carles — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 08:07:18 +0000

SOLTECSIS SOLUCIONES TECNOLOGICAS S.L. has carried out actions focused on expenses for international promotional material, for which it has received aid through the current Ministry of Innovation, Industry, Trade and Tourism included within the aid program to promote the internationalization of exporting SMEs in the Valencian Community for the year 2024.

The project, with file number INTPRM/2024/195, has been supported with a grant of €3,620.00.

La entrada Subsidy granted by the Ministry of Innovation, Industry, Trade and Tourism se publicó primero en SOLTECSIS.

FWCloud: All your firewalls at the reach of your hand

Segis — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 14:53:55 +0000

FWCloud: All your firewalls at the reach of your hand

Would you like to manage all your firewalls easily and securely, anywhere from any device? FWCloud is the solution you need

FWCloud is an OpenSource web application that allows centralized and secure management of Linux-based firewalls, facilitating, in addition to many other functionalities, the management of security policies..

It is an OpenSource project developed entirely by the R&D&I department of SOLTECSIS SOLUCIONES TECNOLÓGICAS, S.L. published with the Affero GNU v3 General Public License, which allows the end user, if they have the necessary knowledge, to use the source code of the program to study it, review it, modify it and make improvements to it, and may even redistribute it..

FWCloud comes up as an idea to facilitate our daily work when managing the computer security of our clients and which we finally decided to convert into our contribution to the free software community to which we have so much to thank. .

Being an in-house development allows us to gradually incorporate new functionalities and improvements as the need arises. Many of these improvements have been proposed through the forum in which the community of users who make use of the application express their doubts and proposals.

FWCloud is an application aimed at computer security whose objective is to simplify the administration and maintenance of computer resources (firewalls, VPNs, networks, etc.) intended to improve the security of a company’s communications.

Firewall, in computing, is the part of a computer system or computer network that is designed to block unauthorized access, while allowing authorized communications.

Firewalls can be implemented in hardware or software, or a combination of both. Firewalls are frequently used to prevent unauthorized Internet users from accessing private networks connected to the Internet, especially intranets. All messages entering or leaving the intranet pass through the firewall, which examines each message and blocks those that do not meet the specified security criteria. It is also common to connect the firewall to a third network, called a demilitarized zone or DMZ, where the organization’s servers located there must remain accessible from the outside network.

A VPN or virtual private network is a computer networking technology that allows a secure extension of the local area network (LAN) over a public or uncontrolled network such as the Internet. It allows the computer on the network to send and receive data over shared or public networks as if it were a private network, with all the functionality, security and management policies of a private network. This is done by establishing a virtual point-to-point connection by using dedicated connections, encryption, or a combination of both methods.

Common examples are the possibility of connecting two or more branches of a company using the Internet as a link, allowing members of the technical support team to connect from home to the computer center or allowing a user to access their home computer from a remote location, such as a hotel. All this using the Internet infrastructure.

FWCloud is a cloud application, which means it can be used from anywhere, at any time and with any device, always with simple and secure access.

FWCloud allows you to manage all firewalls centrally in a very simple and secure way, from a single web interface. You do not need to install anything on your terminal to access the user interface, you just need a web browser.

From a single application we can manage heterogeneous firewalls based on:

Virtual machines.
Bare metal servers.
Routers.
Firewalls embedded in servers.
Multi-node firewall clusters, physical, virtual or hybrid.

It t uses the latest technologies and is accessible through a web interface. In addition to the basic functionalities mentioned (security policy management, configuration and maintenance of VPN connections), it allows, through the use of plugins, to manage advanced functionalities such as: management and assignment of dynamic IP addresses (DHCP), creation of route tables, management of connection blocking rules based on geolocation and even next-generation firewall (NGFW) functionalities such as: QoS (Quality of Service), policy routing, traffic analysis and IDS/IPS (Intrusion Detection System/Intrusion Prevention System), among others.

All of this, always manageable in a simple, graphic and visual way, with actions such as copy, paste, drag, search, group, modify colors, etc.

Creating a security policy rule is as simple as right-clicking and selecting new rule

, then taking the elements that make it up and dropping them into the appropriate fields of the rule as appropriate.

To make the security policy easier to read, the rules can be grouped into groups that can be collapsed or expanded as appropriate.

The FWCloud architecture is based on the separation between the user interface and the API, allowing independent management of the user interface to perform specific tasks.

At the architectural level, FWCloud is mainly composed of two modules:

FWCloud-UI: is the user interface that allows the user to manage cloud firewalls. It is a web interface accessible through browsers such as Chrome or Firefox, developed using the Angular framework to provide a desktop-like look and feel.
FWCloud-API: the REST API that handles all actions requested by the user. It is developed in Node.JS, an event-based JavaScript server environment that executes code asynchronously, performing all the actions allowed by the application. And it is possible to access the API directly without using FWCloud-UI to carry out automatic actions, such as blocking an IP address.

Key design features of FWCloud include:

Simplicity: Allows you to manage all security components in a simple and graphic way.
Security: Given the important role that firewalls play as a fundamental part of computer security, it is very important that access to FWCloud is secure and reliable. For them, triple authentication mechanisms are used that guarantee both the authenticity of the administrator who accesses the application and the encryption of communications.
Multi-tenant: Allows you to manage several clients from the same FWCloud installation.
Firewall cluster management without node limits: Facilitates the management of multiple logically grouped firewalls.
Offline administration: Configuration changes are applied when the user decides, allowing for more controlled management.
Centralized administration: Through the FWCloud web interface it is possible to centrally manage all your firewalls. You do not need to access each firewall individually. From FWCloud you can manage all resources.
Logical grouping of objects using FWClouds: Allows logical grouping of firewall clouds, including firewall clusters, IP objects, groups, VPN connections, etc.
Import and export of FWClouds: Clouds can be migrated between different FWCloud installations.
Configuration and scheduling of backups and snapshotss: Allows the application to be operational again immediately in the event of a catastrophe.
Access to firewalls through SSH protocol or through FWCloud-Agent: It offers two methods for communication with firewalls, always prioritizing security and efficiency in addition to compatibility with managed equipment. FWCloud-Agent improves communication with firewalls, optimizing security and enabling additional functionality.
Auto-discovery: Automatically incorporates a cluster of firewalls, along with their network interfaces and configured IP addresses.
Migration facilities: To incorporate firewalls previously managed by other tools into the application.
Complete and up-to-date documentation: Provides a detailed step-by-step guide to using and configuring the application. The documentation is complemented by video tutorials and a forum where you can ask your questions, propose improvements or share your concerns and experiences with other users of FWCloud community.

FWCloud can be installed on your own servers, both physical and virtual, or alternatively, contact SOLTECSIS to use our cloud service, FWCloud.net, and manage your cloud firewalls.

Installation can be done using the FWCloud-Installer installation script (the traditional method), using the DEB or RPM packages from our repository (the easiest option) or even using a Docker image.

It should be noted that the FWCloud project has been partially funded, for two consecutive years: 2022 and 2023, by the Valencian Institute of Business Competitiveness (IVACE) included within the SME INNOVATION PROJECTS (INNOVA-CV) aid program, in the action of TEIC Innovation, co-funded by the FEDER Funds within the FEDER Operational Program of the Valencian Community 2021-2027.

These types of subsidies are very useful to us to guarantee that we can continue investing in R&D&I in order to improve the solution FWCloud day by day.

In conclusion, FWCloud is a robust, flexible, very complete, free software and continuously growing solution for the centralized administration of advanced Linux-based firewalls, offering a wide range of advanced features and functionalities to facilitate the management of local and remote firewalls. in business and information security environments.

La entrada FWCloud: All your firewalls at the reach of your hand se publicó primero en SOLTECSIS.

Proxmox VE Ceph cluster and DRP using OVHcloud dedicated servers

Carles — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 14:08:47 +0000

Introduction

OVHcloud’s IaaS (Infraestructure as a Service) services allow us to hire dedicated servers (bare metal) for rent that we can have at our disposal in a matter of minutes. There is a wide range of options (rise, advance, storage, scale, high quality, etc.) from which we can choose according to our needs.

In this article we will see how we can use these dedicated servers to create Proxmox VE Ceph Clusters with the same functionalities that we would have if we used proprietary servers in our facilities (on premises). In addition, we will see how OVHcloud services allow us to create a very complete DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) to achieve maximum resilience for our data

Ceph Proxmox VE Cluster

A cluster of Proxmox VE servers combined with a Ceph distributed storage system allows you to create a highly available, load-balanced, horizontally scalable, hyperconverged virtualization infrastructure with ease.

Let’s first look at some concepts to fully understand what a Proxmox VE Ceph Cluster is.

What is a cluster?

A cluster in computing refers to a group of interconnected computers or nodes that function together as if they were a single entity. Clusters are used to improve the availability, performance, and scalability of applications and services. There are different types of clusters, but in general they share the objective of providing greater processing capacity and redundancy.

What is Ceph?

Ceph is a distributed storage system designed to provide object, block, and file storage in a single unified cluster. . Proxmox can use Ceph as a virtual machines storege.

What is a Proxmox VE Ceph cluster?

It is three or more servers forming part of a Proxmox cluster and using Ceph as a distributed storage system, all managed from the Proxmox web interface, thanks to which we achieve a hyperconverged virtualization infrastructure.

What is hyperconvergence?

A hyperconverged virtualization infrastructure is an integrated system that combines compute, storage, and networking in a single environment. This simplifies management, improves efficiency, and enables easy scalability, making it easy to create and manage virtual machines in a single cluster.

By means of the OVHcloud dedicated server service we can create a Proxmox VE Ceph cluster with three or more nodes in the same way that we would do if we acquired our own servers to create the cluster in our facilities, but with the versatility and advantages that come with using rental servers instead of proprietary hardware, among which we can mention:

Abstraction of the hardware layer since any breakdown will be solved by OVHcloud and, if necessary, they will replace the damaged parts or even the entire server.
We forget about hardware obsolescence. After a few years we will be able to add new servers with the latest technologies to our cluster and eliminate the old ones in a completely transparent way for the user of the virtualization environment, without any interruption of service.
Easily add more nodes to our virtualization cluster to increase your computing power. In a matter of minutes we can have new servers that we can add to our cluster.

The large number of dedicated server options that OVHcloud makes available to its clients allows us to create Proxmox VE Ceph Clusters for practically any client. We can use different CPUs depending on our needs, large amounts of RAM, large NVMe disks, dedicated 25Gbps networks for Ceph communication, the vRACK service to connect our servers, dedicated IP ranges, etc. All this allows us to cover practically the needs of any client.

DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan)

A DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) is crucial to maintaining business operations in the event of disasters, guaranteeing the continuity and protection of essential data. It is very important to have a good DRP to ensure the resilience of the data.

What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

Disaster Recovery Plan in IT refers to a set of strategies, policies and procedures that an organization implements to restore its critical systems and data after a catastrophic event or disaster that causes significant disruptions to operations. normal.que cause interrupciones significativas en las operaciones normales.

These events may include:

Natural disasters: Such as earthquakes, floods, fires, storms, etc.
Man-made disasters: Such as cyber attacks, infrastructure failures, acts of vandalism, etc.

The goal of the Disaster Recovery Plan is to minimize downtime and ensure business continuity, allowing the organization to recover quickly after a disaster.

Below we will list several options, taking into account that our DRP may have some of these or even a combination of all of them, depending on the level of data resilience desired. Option 1: Proxmox VE Ceph Cluster distributed in OVHcloud 3-AZ region Our partner OVHcloud has a service called 3-AZ region thanks to which we can distribute a Proxmox VE Ceph Cluster made up of dedicated servers (bare metal) between three different data centers separated by a few tens of kilometers. These data centers that make up the 3-AZ region are interconnected through redundant fibers with minimal latency, thanks to which we can set up a Proxmox VE Ceph Cluster distributed within said region. This provides us with great resilience of the data against incidents located in one of the data centers since our virtualization service will not be affected by it.

Option 2: Proxmox Backup Server with frequent replication Make use of a Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) or by means of our PBS Online service in a data center (even a different country or continent) where you have a backup copy of all virtual machines, maintaining a history of various versions over time depending on the space available for copies. For those virtual machines that are more critical, you can even make more frequent copies (for example, every hour) so that if you have to activate the DRP, the data loss is as little as possible. This option can be implemented using the PBS Online service, the OVHcloud IaaS service to rent a dedicated server on which to install the PBS or any other cloud service or even own facilities in which to locate the PBS.

Option 3: Ceph Replicación Create a Proxmox VE Ceph Cluster identical to the production one in a data center geographically separated from the main cluster and activate Ceph replication between both clusters. This is the option with the least data loss if we compare it with option 2, but much more expensive since we have to have a cluster equal to the main cluster that we will only activate in case of disaster. This option can be implemented using the OVHcloud IaaS service, given that they have data centers distributed in several countries and continents. Therefore, it would be viable to host the main cluster in a data center and the replication cluster located in another country. It can also be implemented using different cloud providers and also on the customer’s premises if he has geographically separated data centers.

Conclusion

As we have seen throughout this article, we can create a hyperconverged virtualization infrastructure with great data resilience using the Proxmox VE hypervisor and dedicated OVHCloud servers. A Proxmox VE Ceph Cluster with three or more nodes located in a 3-AZ region of OVHcloud, in combination with a PBS (Proxmox Backup Server) hosted in a different data center and country is a highly available solution, with high scalability and with great data resilience. If we also add an identical cluster in another data center outside the 3-AZ region with real-time Ceph replication, we can have a DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) that allows rapid disaster recovery.

La entrada Proxmox VE Ceph cluster and DRP using OVHcloud dedicated servers se publicó primero en SOLTECSIS.

2023 – SME Innovation Projects (INNOVA-CV)

Carles — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 16:46:35 +0000

SOLTECSIS SOLUCIONES TECNOLOGICAS S.L., has carried out the project titled “Substantial technological improvements to improve functionality in the computer security application FWCloud” financed by the Valencian Institute of Business Competitiveness (IVACE) included within the SME INNOVATION PROJECTS (INNOVA-CV) aid program, in the action of InnovaTEIC Innovation, with financing from the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund , the subsidy being €44,657.32.

The objective of the project is to improve Soltecsis’ FWCloud tool, focused on computer security, to simplify the management of computer resources related to business security, such as VPNs and firewalls. It seeks to address previous shortcomings and make it the preferred choice for system administrators. Technical goals include the incorporation of advanced functionality to consolidate FWCloud as the standard tool in Linux firewall management, including features such as NGFW and other improvements.

These types of subsidies are very useful to us to guarantee that we can continue investing in R+D+I in order to improve the solution FWCloud day by day.

La entrada 2023 – SME Innovation Projects (INNOVA-CV) se publicó primero en SOLTECSIS.

2022 – SME Innovation Projects (INNOVA-CV)

Carles — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 12:03:55 +0000

SOLTECSIS SOLUCIONES TECNOLOGICAS S.L has carried out the project entitled “Development of an advanced computer security application FWCloud” financed by the Valencian Institute of Business Competitiveness (IVACE) included within the SME INNOVATION PROJECTS aid program (INNOVA-CV) , in the TEIC Innovation action, co-financed by the FEDER Funds within the FEDER Operational Program of the Valencian Community 2021-2027, with a subsidy of €46,813.00.

Through this aid, it has been possible to technologically improve the platform called FWCloud oriented towards computer security, whose objective is to simplify the administration and maintenance of computer resources (Networks, VPNs, firewalls, etc.) destined to guarantee the security of communications of a company. In this way, the objective is that the application becomes the standard tool for managing Linux firewalls.

These types of subsidies are very useful to us to guarantee that we can continue investing in R+D+I in order to improve the solution FWCloud day by day.

La entrada 2022 – SME Innovation Projects (INNOVA-CV) se publicó primero en SOLTECSIS.

New web online

Carles — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 08:55:27 +0000

SOLTECSIS began its journey at the beginning of August 2008, a little over 14 years ago. To make ourselves known and have a presence on the Internet, we created a website through which to show the world our entire range of products and services.

This website, which has been with us from the beginning and has been our showcase, needed a facelift in order to show a more modernized aesthetic, as well as a significant improvement in functionalities. In other words, we needed an evolution that would allow us to have a more practical and direct website that would show the world everything that we are capable of doing in the information technology sector.

For this reason, at the beginning of this year, we decided to ask TresTristesTigres to create a new web portal that would meet all these objectives.

We are proud to announce that today we finally have our new website online.

Among the numerous improvements that we have incorporated, we can highlight:

Direct and structured information. Now it is easier to understand what we do and what our business area is.
On-line shop. Initially for the acquisition of the Proxmox VE and FWCloud training courses, but we will expand it so that it can be used with our other numerous products and services.
Blog. Here we will publish articles related to our day to day. It will serve so that our experts can contribute their experiences, creativity and knowledge to the community.
SEO. The new website has been designed with search engine positioning in mind, to make it easier to find us.

We hope that the Internet community will like it and that it will help us to publicize our full potential in terms of information technology.

La entrada New web online se publicó primero en SOLTECSIS.