Homelab recommendations

Computer Hardware & Server Infrastructure Builds
1

Hello all, i am just looking for some recommendations for how to structure my servers.

I have 1 dell poweredge running xcpng. It has 56 vcpus and 128gb of ram.
I run several vms, but really only use about 60% of the cpus and ram.

I also have another poweredge server on its way, my inital thought was to put them in an HA to avoid dropping some of my services that I host.

Looking a bit into it, i see that really it is best practice to have 3 hosts in the HA, so each one can run checks and balances on the other 2. I also have no NAS currently wich would make the HA setup… unrecommended.

The second server has 40 vcpu and 128 gb ram as well. But also comes with 48 tb of storage, half of which i plan to dedicate to camera footage.

So the question is, do i:

  1. throw xcpng on the second server and try HA
  2. Throw xcpng on the second and just use them together and just migrate back and forth if i need to run maintenence on one specific system
  3. Put something like freenas on the second server and have a NAS already setup for when inevitably end up getting additional systems/servers.

I have never played with freenas before so this might be a perfect opportunity. But i definitely like the idea of having 2 xcpng hosts to test stuff on and have in the case of an “emergency” if a server fails.

Let me know!

2

If you are wanting to use HA, meaning when a host goes offline then your VM’s will start up on another host automatically then you need 3 host because of split brain. If you don’t care about that in particular but are wanting your services on multiple hosts that you can freely migrate VM’s between and start VM’s manually in said situation then you can use 2 hosts in your pool.

TrueNAS is always an excellent option to have your iSCSI/NFS as a storage repo for your hosts. I use it in production professionally and homelab.

2 Likes