A about a week ago, I wanted to expand my ProxMox set up. I was original looking at a newer tower to run it on, but then had an idea. What about a cluster?
Charlie
The Benefits of a cluster would be great. I could take one node down for maintenance, or reboot, without my VMs going down. The VMs could also auto fail over to another node, if one node randomly went down. I like this idea.
So I went online, and went looking. I wanted three of the same computers (for looks), and I didn’t want to spend too much on this. After some looking, I came across a listing for some refurbished Dell Optiplex 7050 Micros. Small, good specs (for want I want), and a good price. I’ll take three!
Foxtrot
Now, as usual, I was given a tracking number for my order. And when it showed up, the box only had one in it… Um, I ordered three, why is only 33.333333333333333% of my order here?
I pretty quickly sent a message to the seller. A professional inquiry into the whereabouts of my order, while pointing a gun at them. Figuratively, with the threat of talking to American Express. Luckily, about an hour after I sent that message, a second shipment showed up in my FedEx account. With the seller responding with the same tracking number. A bit odd, but the other 66.6666666666666666% of my order was on its way.
Set Up
While waiting on the other two computers, I got to work on the one. I got ProxMox installed, made a cluster, and went to add my old server to it.
That was a bigger pain than I thought. ProxMox didn’t want to join the cluster, because it already had VMs. So, I generated some migration data from the software on those VMs, and nuked them. After adding the old server, I rebuilt the VMs. And Home-Assistant didn’t want to restore from its own backup… Fun. Luckily, I had a disk image backup on my NAS.
When the other two showed up, I got them all set up, looking good, and added to the cluster.
Magic
To test out live migration, I fired up a Minecraft Java server. While logged in, I asked ProxMox to move the VM from node 4, to node 3. At no point, did I notice anything off in game during this. The server, had moved one one physical computer, to another. That’s just magic.
So, yeah, I’m pretty happy with this system. Though I do have to replace two of the SSDs, as they are pretty worn out. Thankfully, everything is socketed in these 7050 Micros, including the CPU… Might do something with that down the line.