Powering off node in proxmox cluster

Over the last couple of months, I have finally outgrown the Intel NUC I have been using as my virtual machine server. So, I have gotten a new (to me) Dell R730 to use for my development work.

My goal is for the NUC to continue to run 24X7 running my allways on services and the R730 to only run during my work hours. The NUC sips electricity on average it uses just 17 Watts per hour. While the R730 will take a few hundred Watts under moderate load and a bit more than 100 Watts at idle.

Does anyone know if it is possible to run the nuc and the r730 as two nodes in a proxmox cluster and power off the r730 off when it is not in use? I haven’t experimented enough with the clustering aspects of proxmox to understand if the cluster is going to work correctly with only one of two nodes.

High availability and failover is not an issue for me.

Thanks
David

For the home laber on a budget. You can learn a lot on a surprisingly small server.

I dont think you need to do clustering for that even.

You can have a service on your NUC send a shutdown command to the R730 (lots of ways, like through SSH), and like a minute later have it shut off the power (theres lots of remote on/off power strips available, just pick one that can work with Linux). And when you want it on, turn on the power again. You’ll want to configure the BIOS in the R730 to automatically come on the power, of course.

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Yes, that is my fallback plan. I already do something similar with my remote backup NAS. The NAS at my brother-in-law’s house sends a WOL to the backup NAS to come on in the middle of the night once per week. Then the remote NAS waits for my local NAS to run the weekly remote backup job across a VPN. When the job is done, the backup NAS shuts itself off.

I was just curious about using some of the cool features of clustering in this situation where one of the nodes is shutdown 50-60% of the time.