With the all-in-one concept fully out of the box since the upgrade and the 2.5G networking components arriving, i'm beginning to wonder if i should make an overhaul of the home server infrastructure. The new concept is based on the separation of compute and storage functions. So, the plan is:
- Obtain another one of those HP MiniPCs and make it a Proxmox hypervisor. I kind of like Proxmox and with Broadcom discontinuing the free ESXi, it is time to migrate to something else.
- Migrate the VMs (all except OMV) to the new hypervisor (or distribute them among the two Proxmox hypervisors).
- Transform the old all-in-one "server" into a pure storage device. This shouldn't be a too complicated operation. The OpenMediaVault's system backup is just an image of the boot device, so making it boot from a physical disk is just a matter of restoring the image to it. The data disks are of no concern since they are already independent of the hypervisor layer.
The end result should be an infrastructure with two hypervisor (compute) nodes and one storage node. OMV will continue to serve as my home NAS. For a VM datastore, there are options, but whatever i choose, with the 2.5G networking components already in the mail (from AliExpress) there should be no bottleneck in the server-to-server communication, whether it is NFS, iSCSI, CIFS, Ceph replication... With the VMs out of the storage (at least temporarily), some disk space reorganization might also take place. The current setup is:
- 4x 1TB disks in RAID5
- 2x 2TB disks in RAID1
There are not many options in which this can be optimized but, if OMV is running on bare metal, there are a couple of spare on-board SATA ports that can be used. Just a thought...
From this point onwards i might consider Proxmox HA, but this requires a third Proxmox node, which is kind of an overkill, at the moment. This option is not totally out of consideration as there are alternatives. It is possible to use a VM running on top of OMV as the third device that will only participate in the quorum and not run any workloads. Maybe only I don't think i will use OMV as a hypervisor in general, but i might make an exception for the quorum device. That and maybe a Proxmox backup server.
First thing first, setup 2.5G networking. For now, only the switch has arrived. 4x 2.5G RJ45 ports + 2x SFP+ ports capable of 1, 2.5 and 10G, depending on the SFP module in use. Interesting for future use.
Will post updates...
UPDATE: The good news is that the 2.5G networking components have arrived. The switch, the desktop PCI-E card and the little adapter for the small form factor EliteDesk Mini. The bad news is that the 2.5G network card for the EliteDesk Mini is of the wrong kind, mPCIe instead of M.2 A+E. I've ordered some replacements (both a new card and an adapter), so i cannot test the "high speed" networking until they arrive (come spring 😦). I'm also considering getting an USB-C network adapter from the local market (they are quite scarce and twice as expensive than on AliExpress) to do some early testing. They can be used on the home laptops later.