With my newfound “free time”, I’ve spent a lot of time catching up on my writing. Two PG Phridays in a row, and I have ideas for many more to come. I finally decided to “Open Source” my homelab setup, and since that’s a work-in-progress, it should see many commits in the future. And I finally started earnestly working on the ol’ home lab. Definitely keeping myself busy!
Well, I’ve finally reformatted my Dell R730 project system and replaced TrueNAS SCALE with Proxmox VE once again. Now that I want to go deeper into virtualizing so I can do more Kubernetes experimentation, using a NAS device as the Hypervisor only serves to complicate the process.
Warning: this post contains copious amounts of impenetrable technobabble; read at your own risk.
It’s been a while since I’ve started a project, so of course that means it’s time. As it stands, my r720 is getting a bit long in the tooth and R730s are now the same price I paid for that system. So to Lab Gopher I went in search of a great deal. For anyone who is looking for a server, that is seriously the best thing I’ve found for sorting through all the eBay cruft. As I type this, there’s an R730 with 256GB of RAM for $420 shipped, which is so ridiculous I’m tempted to buy it as a second server.
Ever since my previous foray into building a server, I’v been trolling Lab Gopher for an upgrade. My preference would have been for a Dell PowerEdge R720xd 3.5-inch format since it could hold 12 full-size hard disks. But those are relatively rare and deals were scarce.
To support more of my tinkering in an effort to test various Postgres cluster configurations, I decided it would be really nifty to have a virtual server. I could not only spin up VMs and containers to validate architectures, but experiment to my heart’s content with other potential technologies.