Hey All,
I've been using a couple of home built servers based on the Supermicro A1SAi-2750F board for all my virtualisation for over a decade. They've been running Proxmox for a while which has been great for my homelab needs, however one of my servers died yesterday following a reboot from a Proxmox update. 11 years of near 24/7 service is pretty decent, so no complaints there. It does seem to me though that my best option from here is to rebuild my Proxmox cluster before the last remaining node dies.
My thoughts from here is I would like to seperate my storage from my compute (at least physically) so it is an easier process to cycle units in/out as need be. Keeping in mind this is purely a homelab environment, I'm thinking I'll buy a bunch of cheap brand name SFF workstations from somewhere like eBay. In each of these active systems I'd need to up the memory to the unit max of 32GB as well as install an LSI 9200 8e and PCIe x1 2.5Gbps Ethernet card. The LSI card will hook up to a couple of 4 bay enclosures I have for my 2.5" disks, which are a mixture of SSD and spinning. No point in looking at 10Gbit ethernet as these SFF units only have a single PCIe x16 slot and generally come with one or two PCIe x1 slots. The 2.5Gbe NIC would max out the available bandwidth of a PCIe x1 slots and would be used for cluster comms and VM/LXC migrations.
Trying to keep costs to a minimum given the use case, however also wanting to keep maximum flexibility for the future. What are the short falls of my approach? What is going to bite me in the rear end here?
Really appreciate any assistance/advice!
I've been using a couple of home built servers based on the Supermicro A1SAi-2750F board for all my virtualisation for over a decade. They've been running Proxmox for a while which has been great for my homelab needs, however one of my servers died yesterday following a reboot from a Proxmox update. 11 years of near 24/7 service is pretty decent, so no complaints there. It does seem to me though that my best option from here is to rebuild my Proxmox cluster before the last remaining node dies.
My thoughts from here is I would like to seperate my storage from my compute (at least physically) so it is an easier process to cycle units in/out as need be. Keeping in mind this is purely a homelab environment, I'm thinking I'll buy a bunch of cheap brand name SFF workstations from somewhere like eBay. In each of these active systems I'd need to up the memory to the unit max of 32GB as well as install an LSI 9200 8e and PCIe x1 2.5Gbps Ethernet card. The LSI card will hook up to a couple of 4 bay enclosures I have for my 2.5" disks, which are a mixture of SSD and spinning. No point in looking at 10Gbit ethernet as these SFF units only have a single PCIe x16 slot and generally come with one or two PCIe x1 slots. The 2.5Gbe NIC would max out the available bandwidth of a PCIe x1 slots and would be used for cluster comms and VM/LXC migrations.
Trying to keep costs to a minimum given the use case, however also wanting to keep maximum flexibility for the future. What are the short falls of my approach? What is going to bite me in the rear end here?
Really appreciate any assistance/advice!