I am currently running most of my stuff from an unraid box using spare parts I have. It seems like I am hitting my limit on it and just want to turn it into a NAS. Micro PCs/USFF are what I am planning on moving stuff to (probably a cluster of 2 for now but might expand later.). Just a few quick questions:
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Running arr services on a proxmox cluster to download to a device on the same network. I don’t think there would be any problems but wanted to see what changes need to be done.
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Which micro PCs are you running? I am leaving towards HP prodesk or Lenovo 7xx/9xx series around 200 each. I don’t really plan on getting more than 2-3 and don’t run too many things, but would want enough overhead if I switch stuff over to home assistant and windows and Linux VMs if needed.
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Any best practices you recommend when starting a Proxmox cluster? I’ve learned over time it’s best to set it up correctly than try to fix stuff when it’s running. I wish I could coach myself from 7 years ago now. Would of saved a lot of headaches lol.
Why would you need two nics unless you’re planning on having a proxmox Vm being your router?
You want to have at least 3 if you’re going to do that. I usually use the one on the mobo for all the other services and management. Then a dedicated port for lan and wan on a separate nic.
Security. Keeping publicly accessible and locally accessible on different networks.
Hmmm - not really any more. I have everything on the same VLAN, with publicly accessible services sitting behind nginx reverse proxy (using Authelia and 2FA).
The real separation I have is the separate physical interface I use for WAN connectivity to my virtualised firewall/router - OPNsense. But I could also easily achieve that with VLANs on my switch, if I only had a single interface.
The days of physical DMZs are almost gone - virtualisation has mostly superseded them. Not saying they’re not still a good idea, just less of an explicit requirement nowadays.
I think two NICs is required to do VLANing properly? Not 100% sure.
Nope - Proxmox lets you create VLAN trunks, just like a physical switch.
Edit: here’s one of my Proxmox server network configs.
No, you can do more than 1 VLAN per port. It’s called a trunk
I haven’t done it - but I believe Proxmox allows for creating a “backplane” network which the servers can use to talk directly to each other. This would be used for ceph and server migrations so that the large amount of network traffic doesn’t interfere with other traffic being used by the VMs and the rest of your network.
You’d just need a second NIC and a switch to create the second network, then staticly assign IPs. This network wouldn’t route anywhere else.
In proxmox there’s no need to assign it to a physical NIC. If you want a virtual network that goes as frast as possible you’d create a bridge or whatever and assign it to nothing. If you assign it to a NIC then since it wants to use SR-IOV it would only go as fast as the NIC can go.
This is exactly my setup on one of my Proxmox servers - a second NIC connected as my WAN adapter to my fibre internet. OPNsense firewall/router uses it.