Personally will be trying to transform my server which is currently in a fractal R5 case, into a small-ish Homelab rack, combined with all my network equipment. Will require complete relocation of all network equipment in the house as well as cables so it will be a bit of a project. Also on the lookout for a good quality rack so let me know if you have any recs. Still unsure if u want to do full width rack or mini. Part of me really want the UDM Pro from Unifi…
What are your goals and thing you want to accomplish during 2025?
Migrate from Unraid in a massive tower to a proper JBOD rig in a rack. Finally set up ARM SBC k8s cluster for most things alongside the old x86 hardware for a few services and running the NAS as I don’t know how I’d hook that up to the SBCs.
Definitely check out k3s. I ran a 7 node arm64 cluster for a couple years and it served me well. I’ve since graduated to proxmox/ceph and all that, wish me luck 😅
Ya I’m actually running k3s on em now but they dont do much as I’m switching them all over to eMMC or m.2 storage for the os.
I’ve installed k8s manually before and that’s a fools errand. K3s is so much smoother.
Its a group of rock64 and old pi. Picked up a new orange pi5 as well so itll be a three server node k3s setup.
I was evaluating ceph but I think its overkill for my use. Too many drives needed 😅. I’m okay with parity and none of the data stored is irreplaceable. The stuff that is is off site backed up.
I really just want to mimic the Unraid drive setup and move to infra as code as its easier for me to maintain.
I may end up with proxmox in the end who knows.
Fwiw I switched from k3s to Talos and find it much easier to manage. I run 3 mini 1L PCs with rook-ceph and it works flawlessly even on 1Gbe.
Hadn’t heard of Talos before. Seems pretty neat. Since its run in memory I presume you could netboot it rather easily? I’ve not had issues with k3s myself but an immutable k8s distro sounds pretty nice.
I evaluated rook ceph and raw ceph but I don’t think I need the benefits ceph offers as opposed to the increase in storage of a standard NAS with parity.
My setup was a central NAS hosting an NFS server then each Pi mounted PVs from the NFS CSI driver over the network and I only used local storage to boot the OS.
That is almost exactly what I have planned as well. Glad to hear it worked out for you
Services the only supported sqlite databases struggled (Jellyfin). Anything that worked with postgresql worked like a charm. So trick on the sqlite ones is a local PV then do a task to copy to NFS periodically.
That tracks. That was my plan, a PV on the node I intended to store jellyfin and potentially other sqlite data and back em up for restore later. Will have 2 nodes with m.2 ssd storage for that.