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