Proxmox and CEPH Cluster

Hi Again 👋😊

Thanks for stopping by. This is the part-02 of my Home Lab 2.0 series where I share my thoughts around rebuilding the Home Lab.

I had some time to setup the hardware for my cluster. The newly upgraded Dell Optiplex 7050 Microservers are now sitting on a cheap Kmart kitchen shelf a.k.a my server rack. Hey, its not that bad as it serves the purpose 😊. I’m not very keen to spend on a mini rack or building one at this point of time. Unfortunately there is not enough room for my NAS with this setup, so the Synology sits on the table for now.

So, this is how it looks like at the moment. Yeah, its not the work of art what I want it to be 🫠

Once the logistics sorted out, I installed Proxmox 8.4.1 on them, which is quite straightforward in these days. I have a dedicated VLAN for my Proxmox cluster with the 192.168.193.0/24 range.

Once Proxmox is installed I did the followings before anything else.

1. apt update and apt upgrade the destro

2. Disable the Enterprise repos

3. Add No Subscription repos for both Proxmox and CEPH.

4. Install lm-sensors package to get the thermal stats.

    apt-get install lm-sensors
    modprobe drivetemp
    echo drivetemp | tee -a /etc/modules
    sensors
   

After that I joined the Proxmox nodes into a cluster and setup a CEPH cluster with the NVMe drives. There are many great tutorials on how to setup both Proxmox and CEPH and this one was very helpful. Apparently it took me more time to settle on a name for the cluster, (proxmox-collective) than setting it up ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Right after the cluster setup, I installed Adguard to implement time based service blocks for the kids VLAN. It blocks some distractions during their study times.

Here are some screenshots of the current clsuter state. You can see the list of the repositories as well.

Next I will setup Traefik as my reverse proxy. This can be easily deployed as an LXC container.

Thanks for joining me on this journey. I would love to hear your thoughts!.

Until next time

-`♡´-