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.
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.
Chenbro has announced a new mini-itx home server/NAS chassis that would make for a super small, super quiet OpenSolaris ZFS storage server. Couple this with an MSI Industrial 945GM1 Core 2 Duo Mainboard, 4GB of memory, a 2.5″ system disk, four 750GB or 1TB data drives, and a cheap four port PCI SATA card, maybe an SD card or two for the slog, and you’ll have yourself a mini-thumper. The only con for me is the single system disk, although there are creative solutions around that.