I finally have all the new homelab hardware received and set up.
You might remember my previous post for what I had planned. There were some slight changes in my setup that I want to showcase here.
The 3x MS-01 (Blue Led in the picture) were set up with a 2 TB m.2 boot drive and a mirrored 4TB m.2 for the virtual machines and containers. I am not doing CEPH on this cluster mainly due to the fact that I did not want to buy used enterprise storage on ebay and then not being happy with the setup/performance.
I am doing the same thing I do with my Elitedesks, Replication and HA. Granted I am missing some features since it is not a shared storage and in the worst case my data is 15 minutes behind but besides Zabbix and Grafana monitoring there is not really any data that is very dynamic in my homelab (yet).
The Rack itself is also cleaner than usual now. I still dont like it because its shortdepth and very annoying to get into it but everything fits nicely. I was thinking about rackmounting the MS-01 by designing something myself that would fit but I like the way they are now. This also still gives me easy access and I could go for the external fan mod in the future.
I also just put every server in the same Proxmox cluster. With HA Groups I can kinda set up specific Rules at how everything should be managed. The main issue is still the 1GbE networking on the Elitedesks. If only I had 2.5 GbE Ports on any of my Unifi Gear I could get relatively cheap (30usd) 2.5GbE adapters... the 10 GbE Adapters are just way too expensive (130-200usd).
And getting a new Ubiquiti 24 Pro Max or 48 Pro Max switch also seems overkill. Maybe I get a cheap 4 port 2.5GbE from whatever brand and lose some Ubiquiti UI dashboard stuff.
To get back to the Proxmox cluster, I now have a lot of Compute that I can use for my homelab.
The whole rack (including 2 PoE AP, 1 PoE Switch and 1 PoE Camera) draws about 170-200W which is actually quite good compared to the previous server which was at 120-160W on its own. If there is a 9+ outlets PDU that can monitor each socket and < 300 USD I might think about getting it. Sadly most of them only have 8 outlets, I could just put the modem power outside of the rack though.
This also makes me think about getting a good UPS again. I had some cheap ones where one had an issue that increased the power draw of my whole setup by 100W...
This one looks very interesting but its 800+ USD.
Oh well stay tuned for my next posts!
