Proxmox VE Cluster - Chapter 005 - Hardware Prep Work on the old Rancher cluster

Proxmox VE Cluster - Chapter 005 - Hardware Prep Work on the old Rancher cluster

A voyage of adventure, moving a diverse workload running on OpenStack, Harvester, and RKE2 K8S clusters over to a Proxmox VE cluster.

This post is about preparing the old Rancher cluster hardware for it's new Proxmox cluster use.  These microservers are three relatively new Beelink N5095 devices marketed as tiny desktops.  Not suited for heavy loads but more that capable for testing, and running a couple very small VMs in production.  These will be nodes proxmox21, 22, and 23, of the eventual thirteen node cluster.

The specs for each microserver are quad-core 2.00 GHz Celeron processors with 8 GB of ram and a single storage device, a quarter TB SSD.  The specs are inferior to an Intel NUC from a decade ago, then again the price is about an eighth of what Intel NUCs cost in the mid 2010s, and during the recent "supply chain" problem these devices were always available unlike Raspberry Pi.  Compared to a Pi, they both outperform and are substantially lower cost.  Great little microservers.  The only problem I've found, aside from an ethernet driver issue in Debian/Proxmox discussed later in the series, is they're limited to a single SSD, and the memory as shipped is too small for microserver / homelab applications.

In my experience, as a cluster node, they are heavily memory limited.  CPU use rarely exceeds 25% when the 8 GB of ram is near 100% full.  At least that means it runs nice and cool...

Physically, these microservers are "short cubes" about the size of a CDrom and stack nicely.  They only draw a couple watts of power.  For $10 to $20 per year of electricity, a microcluster of these microservers in a home lab or experimentation lab can run somewhat less than a dozen VMs for somewhat more than a dollar per year of electricity; a price Amazon AWS simply cannot compete with.  With realistic hardware depreciation, a small VM running on this hardware costs perhaps $3 per year.

A preparation checklist:

1. Clean and wipe old servers, both installed software and physical dusting.
2. Relabel ethernet cables and servers.
3. Update port names in the managed Netgear ethernet switch.  VLAN config remains the same, single VLAN, untagged.
4. Remove monitoring of old server in Zabbix.
5. Verify new devices were added in Netbox.

In the next post, install Proxmox VE on the old Rancher Cluster hardware.