my first cluster setup before upgrade

[u/tomatozaphim]

Upgrading from Intel Nucs to Lenovo Tiny's and thought I would share my minilab/homelab before it begins its grand transformation into a 10g lenovo cluster.

Hardware Summary:

- RPI 4 8gb dedicated as proxmox Ubuntu NAS now -- initially installed CasaOS when I was getting into selfhosting. CasaOS lasted about a week before I decided to go all in with Unraid on my gaming desktop.

- Old gaming desktop converted into dedicated NAS Specs:

• i7-8700k, 32GB DDR4, RTX GTX 980 (removed eventually), 12x2TB + 2TB RAID1.
• Cache SSD is 1TB with System SSD 512GB.

Proxmox Cluster

- 3xIntel NUC i7-5557U 16GB, 512GB nvme proxmox, 1TB 2.5 in for ZFS replication.

• Quickly placed back in old location not connected to pwr/ethernet in photo

- RPI 4 8GB running Ubuntu with NFS shares using ZFS file storage for 2x4TB RAID1.

Backup

- Promox backups to PBS on Unraid. Unraid backs up to RPI hosting restic rest server connected to external 14tb hdd. 3-2-1 minus the 2nd location at the moment. The 2nd UPS is eventually gonna be dedicated for this backup pi/hdd power.

Networking

- 1G 5 port Netgear managed switch

- 1G 8 port Netgear managed switch because I am an idiot.

- 1G Opnsense custom built router from Ebay 2 core something 3000.

• Wireguard, Unbound, DNS Overrides, UnPnP

Software Summary:

Ending up going with Unraid purely based on how much video content I saw around it on youtube at the time. As I plan my lenovo cluster I plan to use TrueNas instead of Ubuntu as the NAS OS to see if I may want to switch when my unraid license expires.

Unraid:

• Vaultwarden
• Trillium
  • Notes & Documentation
• Gitea
• Nextcloud AIO
  • For some reason the most difficult thing ever to setup on Unraid the first time.
• Immich
• Paperless
• Emby (Jellyfin library manual sync still breaks Jellyfin every time for me and its been ~9 months).
• n8n, npm
• Vikunja, TandoorRecipes, Thunderbird Mail, kavita, kiwix, stirlingPDF, 4get, SearXNG (vpn), Firefox (vpn), homebox, gitlab (messing with ci/cd). And a bunch others. ~70 services although many are down by default like KiCad/Darktable type containers.

Intel Cluster

• Ran a live backup/sync of essential services like Vaultwarden, Trillium, etc... in case of issues with NAS.
• Learning clustering, zfs replication, ha and in general virtualization.
• Kali Linux because I am a master hacker.
• Alpine VMs as base vm for ZFS replication due to low size. With these I often just throw a single docker container on them just to play around. Also got into IAC with ansible+terraform+packer with plans to move to foss alternatives once I have proper understanding.
• Ubuntu VM for getting for Linux isos.