Posts in category "homelab"

My earlier post for ProxMox 8.2.2 Cluster on Dell Wyse 3040s mentioned the tight constraints of the cluster both with RAM and DISK space. There are some extra steps involved in keeping a very lean Proxmox 8 cluster running on these extremely resource limited boxes. I am running Proxmox 8.2 and Ceph Reef on them which leaves them slightly under resourced as a default. So when the Ceph would not start up the Ceph Monitors after my upgrade from Proxmox 8.2.2 to 8.2.4, I had to dig a bit to find the problem.

Ceph Monitor will not start up if there is not at least 5% free disk space on the root partition. My root volumes were sitting right at 95% used. So our story begins…

What is Ceph? Ceph is an open source software-defined storage system designed and built to address block, file and object storage needs for a modern homelab. Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) makes creating and managing a Hyper-Converged Ceph Cluster relatively easy for initially configuring and setting it up.

Why would you want a Hyper-Converged storage system like Ceph? So your PVE that runs Virtual Machines and Linux Containers has a highly available shared storage service making them portable between nodes in your cluster of machines and thus highly-available services.

There is a significant learning curve involved in understanding how the pieces of Ceph fit together which the Proxmox documentation does a decent job of helping you along. Proxmox VE sets some decent defaults for the Ceph Cluster that are good for an enterprise environment. What they do not do is help you set default to reduce wear and load on your Homelab system. This is where I am going to try out a few things to reduce load and wear on my Homelab equipment while maintaining a relatively high-availability environment.

My post on Ceph Cluster rebalance issue from earlier was from figuring out issues in an unbalanced cluster from a strange data loaded into a cluster. This post is focused on a regular running cluster that needs some optimization for the homelab.

I want a place to test and try out new features and capabilities in Proxmox 8.2.2 SDN (Software Defined Networking). I would also like to be able to test some Ceph Cluster configuration changes that are risky as well. I do not want to do it on my semi-production Proxmox 8.2.2 Ceph enabled Cluster that I have mentioned in earlier posts. With 55TiB of raw storage and 29TiB of it loaded up with content, that would be painful to rebuild or reload if I made a mistake during my testing of SDN or Ceph capabilities.

I am in the process of building a Proxmox 8 Cluster with Ceph in an HA (high availability) configuration using very low-end hardware and questionable options for the various hardware buses. I’m going for HA, cheapfrugal and reuse of hardware that I’ve gathered up over the years.

Over the COVID lockdown, I was running a Plex Media Server (PMS) on an older Dell Optiplex 390 SFF Desktop that I cobbled into it several Seagate USB3 portable drives that I just slapped on it as I needed more space. It hosted my extensive VHS, DVD and BluRay library as I ripped them into digital formats. To improve the experience I threw a Nvidia Quadro P400 into the mix and a PCIe USB3 card for faster access to the drives. Eventually, I had some drive issues and wanted to get some additional reliability into the mix so tried out Microsoft Windows Storage Spaces (MWSS). Windows and the associated fun I had with MWSS left me incredibly frustrated and I was trying to make an enterprise product work in a low-end workstation with a bunch of USB drives. The thing that made me fully abandon MWSS was the recovery options when you had a bad drive. MWSS probably works well with solid enterprise equipment but was misery on the stuff I cobbled together. So exit Windows OS.

For about ten (10) years, I had run an VMWare ESXi server that let me play with new technology and host some content and services. I let it go awhile back while I was in graduate school and working full-time but have missed this as an option ever since. So adding a homelab server or cluster will let me get some of that back.