Help going from single server to clustered setup

jaysun_n

New Member
Jul 15, 2025
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I picked up 5 Lenovo tiny PCs and am looking into creating a proxmox cluster with them but had some questions for how to set them up. I have 2 M93p, 2 M700 and 1 M710q to work with.

1. Can I put the proxmox OS on a single drive ZFS? I’ve heard that for HA and replication, I need to have the thing I want to replicate on a ZFS drive since it uses ZFS to send the data. However when I set up my PCs, the installer says single drive ZFS isn’t allowed. I could install 2 drives on some of the PCs as the M700s and M710q have slots for two drives (a SATA and SATA/NVME M.2) but the M93p can only fit 1 SATA SSD.

2. How much storage should each of my nodes have? My VMs aren’t huge and I’m thinking of setting up a NAS as a separate machine so I don’t think I’ll have major storage requirements on the nodes themselves. Right now the new PCs have a mix of 120GB and 250GB drives though I have 2 1TB drives sitting around.

3. Is there an advantage to running 3 PCs as PVE and 2 as PBS vs 4 PVE and 1 PBS? Are there any good references for node architecture or PC roles?

4. My existing proxmox PC is a single machine which hosts my containers and a 6 drive cockpit LXC NAS. What is the best way to move my containers and data from the old PC to the new cluster? How does storage across multiple nodes work? Do all nodes have effectively the same drive contents?

5. With my old PC getting replaced, its hardware is free for other tasks. I was thinking of still using it as a NAS that all the other PCs can use. Is this a good idea? Should the old PC run proxmox as a node within the cluster or should I install some NAS OS like TrueNAS and then get it to talk to the other PCs?

6. Another option I’ve read is that I can use replication to sync guests every 5 minutes or so across all hosts. Is this a viable solution? Are there any pitfalls with this strategy? I’m assuming that if there is a failure, I can then use one of the replicated guests in another node while the original is broken. I don’t really need HA since it’s a home server and I’m setting this up just to learn about it.

Any help with these questions would be greatly appreciated!
 
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