I decided to move away from my trusty XenServer homelab to Proxmox and will be documenting the various steps taken including some hints & tips I have picked up along the way. Check them out here
But first, heres a little about my home lab setup
Current Build
Hosts / Nodes
- 4 x Gigabyte Barebones GB-BXi3-4010
- 128GB mSATA SSD
- 16GB Ram
- WiFi/BT mPCIe replaced with Google Coral mPCIe Accelerator
- 1 x ReadyNAS Ultra 4 Plus
- ReadyOS 6.10.x
- 8GB Ram
- 4 x WD Red 4TB NAS HDD
- 2 x 1GB Teamed Nics
Networking
- Intenet
- Static IP Broandband – It can be helpfully
- Double Hop Firewalls: ISP + pFsense firewall
- Switches
- Mesh WiFI System
Virtualisation
- Proxmox Virtual Environment 6.4
Other Hardware
- 16 U Server Rack on wheels
- 2 x UPS
- 2 x PDU
- 4 port KVM Switch
Whats next?
I have recently come across a project (pimox) that is a port of Proxmox to support Raspberry Pi4 so plan to build a single Promox node and if it works to tray a 3 node Proxmox cluster configured with Ceph with each node having the following spec
- 1 x Raspberry Pi 4 8GB
- 32GB Micro SD
- 256 USB3.0 SSD
“Why” I hear you ask
First, Because I can
Second, For the fun of it and to tinker – Its in my nature
Third, I would like to run my Home Assistant and various home automation “services” in a cluster rather than on a single Raspberry Pi4
Again I hear you say “why not use a docker swarm”
Well, thats easy to answer. Its been done, well comumented so not fun to learn and do 🙂