Llamatron

Anything Trump touches, and by extension Vance, turns to shit.

So my plan had been to set up a pair of ProxMox hosts, use Ceph to do the shared storage and use HA so VMs could magically move around if a host died. However, I discovered Ceph and HA need a minimum of 3 hosts. HA can be done if you set up a Pi or some other 3rd host that can act as the 3rd vote in the event of a failure but as I didn’t have Ceph I’ve not bothered trying.

I’ve read Ceph can work on 2 but not well or reliably.

I might setup a 3rd host some day but it seems a bit of a waste as I just don’t need that amount of resources for what I’m running.

And I should have known really, I’ve a bit of a background in VMware, albeit at the enterprise level so I’ve never had to even think about 2 or 3 node clusters.

Up until a couple of weeks I was running it on a dedicated Pi4. It’s now running as a VM in ProxMox on a pair of Lenovo M710q mini PCs I got off ebay for £40 each.

I did load them up with RAM, upgrade the CPUs and add a second NIC so they probably came in at more like the cost of a 16Gb Pi5. Each. The RAM was the pricey part. I’ve measured the power usage and they each use about a 3rd more power than the Pi did which I’m happy with. Given that, the added flexibility of running ProxMox and how quiet they are I’m super happy with the setup.

Oh and I used to run PiHole on another Pi. That’s gone now replaced with Technitium DNS running as a pair of VMs too. That was surprisingly easy to do.