I have a home lab I use for learning and to self host a couple of services for me and my extended family.

  • Nextcloud instance with about 1TB
  • Couple of websites
  • Couple of game servers

I’m running off an R430 with twin E5-2620 V3s 128GB and spinning rust storage.

When I deployed NC I did not think it thru, and I stored all the data locally, which causes the instance to be too big to backup normally.

As a solution, I’ve split the NC software into it’s own LXC and a NAS into another and I’m thinking about hosting a cheap NUC NAS to rsync the files.

I would also like to distribute the load of my server into separate nodes so I can get more familiar with HA and possibly hyper converged infrastructure.

I would also like to have wo nodes locally to be able to work on one without bringing down services.

Any advice / tips?

Should I skip the NAS and go straight into Ceph?

Would 3x NUCs with Intel i5 or i7ths and 32Gb Ram be enough?

Would I be better off with 3x pizza box servers like R220s or DL20s?

Storage wise I’m trying to decide between m2 to Sata adapter like this [](

) and a mixtures of SSDs and spinning rust. Or

Otherwise would I be better off with SFF?

Otherwise I was considering a single 24 bay disk array with an LSI card in IT mode, but I’m inexperienced with those and I’m not sure about power usage / noise. (the rack does sit next to my workstation)

And yes you can put an LSI card on a NUC surprisingly (This looks like a VERY fun project) https://github.com/NKkrisz/HomeLab/blob/main/markdown%2FLenovo_M720Q_Setup.md

Plus, most likely I would not expand the storage past 5 or 10 TB on each node.

Additionally; I’m looking at cost per watt (current server runs at 168w 90% of the time, looks like those tiny NUCs run about 25W or so and the SFF 50-75W depending on what they have. The shallow depth servers also idle at 25-50 depending on storage and processor options.

I also have a 12U rack at home and I would very much like to keep things racked and neat. It seems a lot easier to rack the NUCs than it would be to do with SFF cases.

Obviously I’m OK with buying new hardware (I’ll be selling the current one once I migrate) that’s part of the “learning” experience.

Any advice or experience you can share would be highly appreciated.

Thanks /c/selfhosted

  • punkibas@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    I went with three lenovo tiny 1L for my cluster and am very happy with the result. This thread has a lot of info on their upgradability. I chose them because of the low power consumption and the pci-e slot, planning on upgrading them to 10gbe when I need to, but right now they can idle at as low as 5w.

    I’m running a proxmox cluster on them with a dedicated nvme on each one for ceph storage (they have 2 nvmes each) and they work very well, much better in fact than the proxmox cluster with ceph we have at my job that’s using ssds for storage.

    Setup was a breeze as proxmox will set it all up from it’s graphical interface automatically and am running all my workloads on VMs and LXCs. HA is also pretty easy with proxmox, and I’ve mingled with both docker swarm and kubernetes by creating VMs on each of my nodes. But ultimately I decided I like the versatility of proxmox with it’s LXCs and VMs better than having to deal with the overhead of both of those solutions. In any case, all those unused VMs are still sitting there, powered off, in case I ever have something I want to manage through swarm or k8s.

    It all gets backed up to a proxmox backup server I have set up on another 1L PC with a 5TB drive in it.

    Besides that, I have a NAS for my movies, photos, etc. That also gets a copy of the backups and it itself backs up everything important to a remote hetzner storage box with backrest.

    I have also set up a VPS with Pangolin for external access that’s working great.

    With this setup I can pretty much set up anything I want with HA and know that both me and my friends and family can count on that service to work 100%