From Disaster Recovery Nightmares to Seamless Failover: Our Proxmox VE and Ceph Journey.

Introduction: Back in October 2015, we were managing our email infrastructure the old-fashioned way — RAID replication and hourly rsync and database sync jobs across servers for 5+TB Storage. It was functional, but we knew it was only a matter of time before the cracks in the system started to show. Our disaster recovery (DR) drills were a nightmare. Syncs were inconsistent, switching servers was painful, and downtime was almost inevitable.

We needed a solution that wouldn’t just patch the problem but solve it once and for all. That’s when we stumbled upon Proxmox VE and Ceph, and everything changed. Here’s how we made the shift and the data that backed up our decision.

The Pain of Our Old Setup: At the time, we thought we were doing everything right. We had RAID replication on the same hardware for redundancy and rsync jobs scheduled every hour to sync data and databases between our servers. Theoretically, it was a sound system. But in practice, we ran into three major problems:

• Inconsistent Syncs: Rsync wasn’t built for our high-transaction environment. We’d frequently experience data mismatches, especially during peak times.
• Disaster Recovery Drills: Every time we ran a DR drill, we struggled to sync the last-minute…