Proxmox Homelab Layout thoughts

[braindance]

Hello Proxmoxians

I've recently been given a pair of old Dell 1RU servers, a R440 and R410. After a little "fun" getting firmware and bios up to date on both, I'm thinking about how to build a proxmox lab/environment.

One of the servers has no storage, so I slapped in 2x SSDs I had floating round, the other has 3x 2TB SAS drives and an SSD pair for OS.

I was previously running some VM/Container stuff on some old desktop hardware, such as pihole and home assistant, but now looking to do a bit more home stuff. Whilst I do work in the IT industry, in my day to day I work mainly on Azure/MS365 things, so my Linux skills leave a bit to be improved upon which is part of the reason I want to build up the home lab.

Some of the other things I've been thinking about doing with the extra hardware is possibly running a NextCloud instance, some game servers, a FoundryVTT instance and a matrix server for some friends.

I'm currently running an older Ubuiquit Edge router and Edge Switch for my network, and am confident in their configuration for things I need/want to do (Network Bonding, QoS etc).

My two ideas for how to run the environment were:

• Proxmox Cluster:

Install Proxmox on both servers, and build as a cluster. If I went this path, what would be the best way to expose the storage on the second server to any VM/Containers running on the first server? Would their be any major drawbacks that I haven't thought about.

• Proxmox + TrueNAS

Install proxmox on the faster machine, and use the older one as storage only. I expect I would expose the storage via NFS directly to the proxmox host in this case, and then attach to the VM/Containers? The only thing I've seen that has made me question this is that from my understanding ZFS shouldn't be run on hardware raid controllers, which the server with the storage drives does have (H700).

Any thoughts on which way would be "Best"?

 

[bobmc]

Well, to really have a cluster with migration support, you really need two hosts with a seperate storage system. A distributed file system like ceph or gluster might work but you seem to need pretty decent hardware to get anything like decent performance with these.

You could run the H700 in raid and present a single logical drive to TrueNAS but it's not a great use case. Check to see if you could install a different HBA card in the server (H200/H300 can be flashed to work in IT-mode) and then either run Proxmox + TrueNAS or run Proxmox as a dual Virtualisation and Storage server. That would be my advice. You'll save money on your power bill as well.