My Homelab Proxmox Cluster - End-to-end(ish) Documentation

[scyto]

Hi!

I started my fist ever proxmox cluster two months ago for my homelab.
It is now finished thanks to the help and efforts of many on this forum - thank you to all who helped me and were patient with my dumb questions.

Initial Goals of cluster:

• use 3 Intel NUCs for low space footprint
• implement ceph for HA failover of VMs
• user thunderbolt-net connections for a 26Gb/s ceph and migration network
• migrate my VMs from Hyper-V to proxmox
  • 3 x windows (including 2 domain controllers)
  • 3 x Debian (my docker swarm running glusterfs)
  • 1 x Home Assistant

Other things i did / learnt along the way:

• enable IrisXE vGPU pass through
• using lets encrypt for proxmox certs
• implement Azure AD login to proxmx
• install proxmox backup on my synology
• send proxmox email alerts to O365 using a postfix lxc
• how to get fixes for two thunderbolt issues into the Linux kernel (these are now in 6.2.16-14-pve - thanks @Thomas Lamprecht !)
• how to compile the Linux kernel
• how great this community is
• how great the proxmox folks are

I documented all of the above in my notes along the way using GitHub gists- this is to allow me to remember what I did and allow me to rebuild from first principles if needed.

While not a tutorial i think they are comprehensive enough to show what one example of a cluster looks like from start to finish.

I don't claim any of this is the right way or best practice (because i know much of it isn't) , and definitely wouldn't say this is production grade for anything critical. This only has to keep me happy and make sure the wife doesn't moan if my projects make something breaks she relies on. So no warranties on this and YMMV.

Sorry, I have no plans to reproduce these notes in the forum but if folks think it is useful / acceptable let me know and I will mark this post as tutorial.

I hope these are useful to other newcomers like I was 2 months ago.