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%

I’ve been using this for a while now, that docker compose integration is gonna be a welcome addition, keep up the good work!