OS - Windows

How to create a Proxmox cluster

• Data 20/05/2025
• Autor Costin Dumitru
• 3
• 208

Once you have all the nodes ready, access them in a web browser, and log in to the Proxmox VE web GUI. I connected to my first Proxmox server (pmox-host1). Click the Datacenter option at the top, choose Cluster, and then click the Create Cluster button.

Give a unique name to your Proxmox cluster, and select a link for the cluster network. I will keep the default link (0) selected. It is a good idea to choose a network link that isn’t used for other high-traffic needs, such as network storage.

You can click the Add button to add a failover link if multiple network links are available on your node. Click the Create button, and you will see a task viewer window showing the status of cluster creation.

Add nodes to the cluster

When adding nodes to your Proxmox cluster, make sure no VM or container is running on the node. When you add a node to the cluster, it will inherit the cluster configuration, which will overwrite all current local configurations. If you have an important VM or container running, you can create a backup, remove it, and import it later after joining the cluster.

To join a node to the cluster, you need to copy some information from the first node where you created the cluster. To do that, navigate to Datacenter > Cluster and then click the Join Information button, as shown in the screenshot.

Click the Copy Information button to copy the cluster join information to your clipboard.

Now, connect the other Proxmox node that you want to join to the cluster. Navigate to Datacenter > Cluster, and click the Join Cluster button, as shown below:

In the Information box, paste the join information, type the root password of the first node, and click the Join button.

The second node will now be added to the Proxmox cluster. As soon as the node is added to the cluster, the server certificate is changed, so you need to reload the page and log in again to the Proxmox VE web interface. The screenshot below shows that our proxmox-lab cluster now has two nodes: pmox-host1 and pmox-host2.

The information about cluster nodes is listed under the Cluster option. In addition, any shared storage that is attached to the first node is automatically attached to the new node.

Once you have a Proxmox cluster up and running, you can start migrating your VMs or containers when needed, as shown in the screenshot below:

The migration is pretty fast, particularly when you’re using shared storage (e.g., NAS or Ceph), so your VM will experience little to no downtime at all. The cool feature you get with a Proxmox cluster is that you can still migrate your VM (or container), even if you’re using local storage. Of course, it takes longer to migrate, but it works.

Problem with a 2-node cluster

It is entirely possible to set up a Proxmox cluster with just two nodes, as we did above. However, as mentioned earlier, the Proxmox cluster depends on quorum votes. For a quorum to exist in a cluster, the majority of nodes need to be online. With just two nodes in a cluster, both get an equal number of votes, so when either node goes down, the quorum will be lost, and the Proxmox cluster switches to read-only mode. As a result, the cluster will stop functioning as expected. This makes server maintenance hard in a two-node cluster setup.

To deal with such a situation, there are two options:

1. Manually set the expected votes to 1 by running the pvecm expected 1 command. This command changes the expected votes temporarily, which revert after restart. But it will help maintain the quorum so that your Proxmox cluster can continue to work with just a single node while you perform maintenance on the other node.
2. Alternatively, you could set up a corosync-qdevice in Raspberry Pi or Docker and use it as a tiebreaker for quorum votes when one of two Proxmox nodes is down. The purpose of qdevice is to vote for the active node to maintain a quorum when there are just two nodes (or an even number) in the Proxmox cluster. The use of qdevice is not recommended when there are an odd number of nodes, as it could hurt cluster stability.

Considering the above situation, it is clear that it is a good idea to have at least three nodes in a Proxmox cluster, particularly in a production environment. Furthermore, you will be able to use the additional features, such as high availability, when there are three or more nodes in the cluster.