That actually looks cool. Are you looking to make sort of an article or blog post and publish the results?
Pvt-Snafu
joined 1 year ago
As mentioned, you could get a free license. Or, if you like ESXi, VMUG advantage: https://www.vmug.com/membership/vmug-advantage-membership/
That's a nice and clean setup. Well done!
Option 1: VMware vSAN (plus witness on some other machine): https://core.vmware.com/resource/vsan-2-node-cluster-guide or Starwinds vSAN: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/vsan that has a free option if I'm not mistaken with just two R630s and decommission R620. Lower power consumption and you get proper HA.
Option 2: Use R620 as a TrueNAS system providing storage over NFS or iSCSI to ESXi cluster. That R620, however, becomes a single point of failure and consumes more power.
Cool rack! The setup looks very neat and clean. Definitely a big step forward. Nicely done!
It should take up to 138GB for boot but you can also change the settings during the installation: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/81166
A lot really. Mostly related to the projects we do for our customers at work like disaster recovery with vSphere Replication, Hyper-V Replica, Zerto, HA clusters with XCP-NG, VMware vSAN, Starwinds vSAN and so on. Also, Zabbix, TrueNAS, CheckMK.
I would honestly just go with two separate mirrors unless you need performance (of course if all drives are CMR and on the same RPM level). With MDRAID or ZFS.
There shouldn't be any issue with running Kubernetes in a Linux VM on Virtualbox. At least as far as I can tell. You can just try it.
NAS drives come with a longer warranty and are a bit optimized for 24/7 operation. As to and SSD, if you need uptime, then RAID. SSD can fail just as an HDD. Also, keep in mind that RAID is not a backup. Also, with backups, ideally, follow the 3-2-1 rule: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/
For a starting homelab, I would look into Optiplex. Would be more powerful than a laptop (most likely). As mentioned, i5 or it or higher.
I would look into something of HP G9 or Dell R730/R630 range. These will be more power-efficient and you should find something within that price.