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
Id say don’t go down the distributed software route just yet. An option is to keep the NAS and set up a new computer with your router or whatever handling dns to it for services. You should be able to use NAS storage over the network. It’ll be slower, but let’s say you put your database on the big one, then it shouldn’t be so bad since you’ll just make database calls to it.
There are a lot of options. I’m currently learning kubernetes and all that stuff is a big learning curve, so avoid that stuff.
My thoughts: you can do some simple dns load balancing between the two servers at whatever level is handling that. Set up a database on the storage server and let the new computer communicate to it over the network.
Appreciate your input. K8 is on the roadmap. Currently on portrait using pangolin as a tunneled proxy.
Eventually plan to migrate from Joomla in LXC to a docker swarm load balanced by pangolin.
It sounds like you’re diving right in. If you go that route, one thing I found was that Ceph wants to work with while drives only, not partitions. I switched to using longhorn so I could take advantage of all of my storage without throwing any away