Educaship Proxmox

Educaship Proxmox (hereinafter, #The Platform) is the combination of ProxmoxVE instances, those software packages that support them, as well as complete documentation for all of them that students and other customers of Educaship may utilize in their vocational skills and career development.

Double Objective

#The Platform shall serve two equally-important objectives. It shall be both (a) the #Technology Stack and (b) #Learning Resource.

Technology Stack

#The Platform shall technologically support functionality, usability, reliability, performance, security, scalability, and user satisfaction of Opplet, which is the technology where the end-users are served.

Learning Resource

#The Platform shall be a collection of learning resources for those customers who would like to learn and have a work-alike practice. Specifically, that means that #The Platform shall:

1. Be fully documented at the CNM Lab for those students who have a work-alike practice.
2. Be well-documented without security-sensitive details at the CNMCyber.com for those students who would like to learn about #The Platform.
3. Use various software; the students shall have opportunities to practice with as many popular COTS open-source packages as possible.

Instances

Currently, #The Platform consists of two instances, #Federated VE and #Peripheral VE. #We will consider #Adding More VEs when such a need emerges.

Federated VE

The federated part of #The Platform is called CNM Bureau Farm and is based on three metal servers of Bureau Infrastructure. It utilizes ha-manager and Ceph storage.

Peripheral VE

The peripheral part of #The Platform is called CNM Lab Farm and is based on one metal server of Lab Infrastructure.

Adding More VEs

When #We need more resources, #We plan to add more instances similar to #Peripheral VE to the #Federated VE.

Functionality Projects

Jitsi Functionality

Educaship Jitsi, which is Jitsi software deployed at Opplet, is used for webconferencing. Currently, we use some instance outside of #The Platform because of challenges as follows. We have multiple Jitsi installations, one of which is in Docker. In this installation, there is no sound at all. Also, when updating Docker, a conference is not created.

Openness to the World

Educaship pfSense, which is pfSense software deployed at Opplet, is used as a firewall at #Federated VE. To utilize pfSense better, we consider clustering VMs at #Peripheral VE and placing HAProxy and similar proxies behind pfSense on the #Federated VE.

We are experiencing some issues obtaining SSL certificates for our sites running behind Pfsense. Due to the absence of the certificate, the service becomes completely unavailable.

VM Automation

We would like #Peripheral VE and #Peripheral VE only to create a VM for each VM customer automatically. In some cases, we have used Ansible. For that purpose, we tentatively plan to establish Educaship Ansible and Educaship Terraform. However, we are open to any other solution as well.

Storage Projects

Backup and Recovery

For backups and recovery,

• Educaship Proxmox Backup, which is Proxmox Backup Server software deployed at Opplet, is used at #Federated VE.
• Educaship RAID, which is RAID software deployed at Opplet, is used at #Peripheral VE.

We also consider adding NAS, as well as advancing the whole backup and recovery system, which possibly, would be called Opplet Backup.

File Storage, Library, or Repository

Our various applications may utilize the same files. We are looking for a solution for these websites' files to have a shared storage or library. We tried GlusterFS, but it seemed too slow to us. We copied the files to this storage for almost a week, and as a result, the website did not work.

We envision that the solution will play a role similar to the role of Wikimedia Commons. The Commons is a media repository of images, sounds, videos and other media that various Wikimedia Foundation projects use.

Storage for VMs

We are looking for solutions for distributed storage available to those VMs that would be clustered on the #Peripheral VE. We have several websites that use Educaship MariaDB; their databases are combined in a Galera Cluster, which more or less satisfies our needs. We would like to explore other options and find solutions for those applications that don't use Educaship MariaDB.

Service Projects

Monitor Location

We would like to decide where to locate monitoring tools -- (a) on #Federated VE, (b) on #Peripheral VE, (c) outside of the servers that serve #The Platform, or (d) some combination of something above.

Monitoring Tools

Our current monitoring doesn't satisfy us. We use Educaship Grafana for Proxmox. We would like to add several servers that do not use Proxmox, configure communication channels, and expand monitoring according to our tasks. We would also like to add Educaship Zabbix and Educaship Nagios.

Security Outline

Our security outline shall be reviewed and improved.