ACCESS ARCHITECTURE FOR LOCAL WEB SERVICES BASED ON OPENSOURCE VIRTUALIZATION INFRASTRUCTURE
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.28925/2663-4023.2026.34.1247Keywords:
Proxmox VE, Hypervisor, KVM, virtualization, Ubuntu Server, Debian Linux, web service, ZFS file system, reverse proxy, CloudflareAbstract
The paper proposes a model for using a server virtualization environment based on the Proxmox VE open-source software for web service deployment. The relevance of the study is driven by the need to modernize the IT infrastructure of higher education institutions under conditions of severe hardware constraints and a shortage of available public IPv4 addresses. It is suggested to implement web services on separate virtual machines with private IP addresses and open-source guest server operating systems to ensure easy backup and the independent, secure operation of each instance. By utilizing a reverse proxy on a dedicated gateway virtual machine, bridging enables access to target web services using only a single public IP address, with the prospect of further infrastructure scaling. Centralized management of security certificates at the proxy server level eliminates the need to generate them for each virtual machine individually. The paper provides a detailed analysis of the advantages of using the ZFS file system. It was established that the application of data compression algorithms (lz4) and the ZFS snapshot mechanism not only ensures information integrity but also significantly enhances disk I/O performance on legacy hardware, minimizing system recovery time after failures. The practical experience of integrating the developed infrastructure with the Cloudflare cloud DNS service is described, providing an additional layer of protection against external threats and optimizing network traffic. A comparative study with commercial counterparts (VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V) confirmed that the chosen Proxmox VE-based architecture demonstrates significantly lower virtualization overhead, which is a critical factor for the efficient operation of servers with limited RAM. The proposed model is characterized by high scaling potential through the possibility of combining nodes into cluster structures. The results obtained can be implemented in university departments as a reliable, cost-effective, and technologically flexible alternative to proprietary solutions.
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