I’ve been self-hosting Home Assistant for over a year, and I want to take the dive into more self-hosting. I want to start by converting an old laptop into a home server. Assuming that goes well, I’ll probably want to upgrade to a more modern, purpose built server and NAS fairly soon. How can I make sure that what I set up on the laptop can be easily moved to my upgraded hardware later?

Additional notes:

  • I’m already using Tailscale (it’s what prompted me to want to do more self-hosting)
  • I want to be able to access my server via Tailscale, but I want everything mapped to my own custom domain via a reverse proxy
  • I’m planning on using Proxmox

Thanks in advance for the advice! :)

  • tofuEnglish
    7·
    6 days ago

    With Proxmox it’s quite easy, you can copy the VM/LXC Backups to the new host (via SCP, NFS or whatever) and restore there. Recently did exactly that.

    • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
      31·
      6 days ago

      You could even just create a cluster and do a migration. I don’t think you need zfs for that, you only need zfs for replication.

      • tofuEnglish
        3·
        6 days ago

        Should work indeed, but they’d need replicated space. I’m not sure how well that works if the cluster is only designed to be temporary, since removing a productive node from a cluster is a bit risky?

        • jonathan7luke@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
          2·
          6 days ago

          I’m not sure how well that works if the cluster is only designed to be temporary, since removing a productive node from a cluster is a bit risky

          Good callout. Just did some reading on the concept of maintaining a quorum, which I didn’t know about. Definitely need to be careful if I go with that approach, but it does sound interesting! I’m not entirely opposed to leaving the old laptop as a node and then using it for experimental stuff or maybe running just one specific standalone service on it after moving the critical stuff to the new server.

          • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
            21·
            6 days ago

            You don’t need multiple devices and quorum unless you’re using HA. I have two nodes just so I can migrate back and forth when doing updates instead of shutting all the VMs down. No quorum, no HA.

            • jonathan7luke@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
              1·
              5 days ago

              Oh, nice! Thanks for explaining that. I didn’t realize there was a way to run a cluster without HA.

        • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
          31·
          6 days ago

          I edited, since it was ambiguous. I think you only need zfs if you want replication, cold migrations should be fine without it.

          Removing nodes from clusters is fine. It’s not really encouraged, but if a node fails you have to be able to remove it, so it’s possible.