It’s time to refresh the homelab again. What better time to reshuffle hardware around and buy new hardware you probably don’t need… anyone with a homelab understands it’s a never ending cycle.
What do you do when you want to run an HA Proxmox cluster and you only have two nodes? Proxmox needs three nodes in order to provide quorum if one fails, and sometimes it isn’t practical to have a complete third machine running.
It has been about six years since I last upgraded my co-lo box that hosts a myriad of services and websites for opensource, business, friends, and personal hobbies. Now I have a new machine in place that should last at least another six years. A tremendous amount of thanks goes out to Andrew at NETPLEX for dealing with the inevitable problems that come up when you ship a machine nearly 1000 miles.
Hybrid storage pools are the new coolest thing in ZFS land and are being pushed commercially with the recent release of Sun’s 7000 series open storage. For various reasons, Sun has only added a supported SSD option to the X4540 Thor systems. This unfortunately doesn’t help those of us wanting to extend our X4500 Thumper investments and get in on the SSD performance action. I’m fairly certain you could buy Sun’s Thor solution and use it in your Thumper, but I for one wasn’t impressed with the price.
Every self-respecting geek has a home media server to store their CD and DVD rips, downloaded TV shows, photos, etc. and I’m no exception. I’ve always found it interesting to see what others put together to fill this void, so I’m returning the favor by showing off my current setup:
The full components list includes:
Chenbro RM31212B 3U Rackmount Chassis including a 460W Zippy PSU Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.