I took a bit of a break from homelab work to catch up on other areas of my life.
The next addition to the network will be a used Dell R730 to run Proxmox as my virtual machine server. After learning the basics on consumer gear, I am ready to stretch out to more enterprise-level equipment. I am pretty excited to have 128GB of EEC memory and dual Xeon E5-2680 v3 CPUs. I’ll start with an old spinning drive and upgrade as needed. I am thinking of a couple of SSD hard drives or NVMes for the OS and VMs.
I am a bit concerned about power, heat, and noise. I will still have my NUC for 24X7 VM and the NAS 918+ as the file server. Hopefully, I can set it up to power down and power off when not needed.
I am not 100% sure but with proxmox cant you set it up so it shuts down the vm’s at a time that suites and then when you start it up it restarts all your vm’s on boot up? maybe an option for you?
Sorry, If I was not very clear. This is my first proper attempt at clustering with proxmox.
My concern was about how the cluster would deal with one of the physical nodes goes offline due to being powered down.
I have run a couple of experiments over the past couple of days:
The powered-off node has a red X over its icon to indicate it is unavailable.
Surprisingly, the rest of the GUI does not seem to realize that the node is missing. You can manipulate the configurations as if the node was there. When you hit apply, the cluster pauses a few moments and responds with a no quorum error. That seems reasonable.
Otherwise, the remaining node works just like normal.
I have to do a bit more testing to see what will happen if a prescheduled backup tries to run when one of the nodes is down.
You might want to consider looking on eBay for “L” series Xeon CPUs that are compatible with the R730. I’ve done that on the previous model, so it’s a bit of an assumption that the R730 has those too, but the L series CPU’s use lower power. Sometimes, you can get them used really cheap.