I currently have the following servers as part of an xcp cluster in the home lab.
each server has a 4x port NIC installed.
I want to bring in one more server in the told but I’m thinking of a mini-pc. Maybe a beelink. My concern is at most i see these products with 2x gig ports. Does my 3rd server need to be 4x ports or can i get by with 2?
I think the NICs would be the least of your worries. I would think you are going to have a hard time migrating VM’s between hosts if your CPU’s aren’t the same.
Networking is done at the pool level and if a host has less interfaces then you will only want to define the networking based on the host with the fewest interfaces.
Hi @michmoor - your pool network config will determine how easy, difficult, or impossible this mixture may be. Remember that a pool’s network config applies to all hosts. So if you’ve defined 4 networks, each with one of the NICs, then the miniPC will only be able to participate in 2 of those networks (assuming it even allows adding to the pool).
If you’ve only configured 1 or 2 networks at pool level (correlating with 1-2 NICs), then you might be OK.
@xMAXIMUSx - if the CPUs are all x86/x64 and within a reasonable about of generational differences, migrating VMs should be fine. But if the miniPC is too difference, or has ARM CPU, then absolutely the CPU differences will be a problem.
I’ve played with mixed CPUs in a pool before, and at best it works fine, at slightly worse you have to stop the VM and start it manually on a specific host to ‘migrate’ it, and at worst the VM will not start or will not be healthy because the guest OS doesn’t like what it sees as a CPU change.
Really appreciate the feedback everyone.
So my takeaway is that at the very least, i will need at least 4x NICs as i am using that many in the design and defined in the pool.
I was sort of thinking that would be the case but i wanted confirmation (praying that i could get away with 2)
Im using one for storage. One for management, Two for a bond.
Appreciate the help everyone !!