SFF HA cluster hardware

[CharlieViking]

I'm building a three node proxmox ha cluster with kubernetes. I'll be running standard home media server stuff, but also things like pfsense, roon, freepbx, Minecraft, nextcloud, etc. The plan is to put storage over 10gb iscsi. I'm very space constrained, targeting roughly 1 liter devices.

The best option that I have found is the ms-a2. It checks all the boxes except ecc. I would prefer to go with enterprise workstations, but all of the options seem to have one issue or other, primarily lack of support for 10gb (or buggy support for it). Should ecc be a hard requirement? If so, any recommendations for a sff device that supports it and 10gb?

 

[LnxBil]

enterprise workstations, but all of the options seem to have one issue or other, primarily lack of support for 10gb

What enterprise workstations do support anything but ECC? Also 10 GBE is old, all server I worked with in the last two years have already 25 GBE cards and above. You cannot configure 10 GB cards anymore. All those workstation work out-of-the-box with PVE and are also SFF, but I suppose you mean something different by that.

 

[CharlieViking]

Yeah, thanks for pointing it out. I always have thought of sff just generally meaning "a very small PC", but I guess it is more specific.

I was actually able to find a solution to my problem so I'll share details here in case it is useful to anyone else in the future.

I have a 12u rack that is about 22 inches deep and only have 3-4u available for the 3 compute nodes that I need. Most sff workstations are too big for the space, so I have been searching for the smallest devices that have both ecc RAM and 10gb sfp (because 10gbe is hotter). There are options available from Dell, HP, and Lenovo that are around 1 liter. The Dell (micro) and Lenovo (p330 tiny gen 2) options do not support ecc. I looked at super micro options also, such as the micro cloud, but couldn't find anything that works with my depth constraint

The HP Z2 mini G1i (not g1a which doesn't support ecc) seems to the only option. There are two models and I haven't been able to figure out which is which beyond pictures, but some of the models support pcie cards. They all support 64gb ecc, though it can't be ordered that way as far as I can tell. 64gb is on the low side, but I think it will work.

It seems like there are some low profile 25gb sfp cards, so I may give that a try. Thanks!