3 Homeservers | proxmox - new or available hardware?

[DeepB]

Hello,

I am currently planing the build of 3 homeservers to run a Proxmox-HA cluster with CEPH. They will be joined over 40GbE.

Load will probably be quite small, I plan to run the following (partly in docker containers on a VM, partly in its own vm):

• 3 Wordpress instances
  
• Homeassistant (home automation software)
• Nextcloud
• simple webserver for static sites
• OpenVPN
• pfSense
• Tiny Tiny RSS (RSS-Server)
• 2 database containers for different uses (mongodb, mysql)
• Plex or JellyFin (Media Server)

I am now considering if I want to use Hardware that I already have available or If it is better to buy new/used (or use 2 available servers and build a new one). Main criteria is total cost over runtime (kWh ~18ct where I live (Europe))

I have available:

1. "Server" with I5-4460T, Asus H97M-Plus, 2x4gb DDR3 Non-ECC Ram, 2x64GB SSD
2. Server with Xeon E3-1230V3, Intel S1200V3RPS Board and 32GB of DDR3-ECC Ram
3. "Server" with Celeron G1820, Asrock B85M, 5GB DDR2 non-ECC Ram
4. Server with dual Xeon E5-2620, 64gb DDR3 ECC-Ram, Intel S2600GZ4 S2600G (Z/L) Dual LGA2011

As that hardware is quite old, would it make sense to build new (PC compnents, not server components)?

Thanks
Daniel

 

[vl1969]

The issue they jumps out for me is that your existing hardware is very diversed. When you run a HA cluster all nodes need to be as close in config as possible for a stable performance.
Also you need to plan for all your nodes to run mostly at half the capacity leaving the other half for emergency fail over.
Thik About it, when you have a 3 node cluster and each node is capable of running 10 VMs. Can you run 30 VMs on it? Technically yes. But if ine node fails and you need to migrate the VMs of it you have no capacity to do so. So ideally in the above setup You can run 15 VMs 5 on each node with understandings that in an emergency you have spare capacity in either node left to move your VMs to it.
So in your case I woild pick the most powerful hardware you have and add 2 more matching the config as close as possible. If your hardware is very very old try to identify the components that can be reused and get the rest new.

 

[DeepB]

Most of those I currently run on server #3 the one that has the least power of all my current hardware.

I do not need live migration, the only "real" use-case is that I want the home-automation to start on another server when it is down. Migration/restart time (however that is called), is not a real concern as long as it is <10min or so.

When I travel and the Home-Automation server goes down my wife will not be happy. Thus this setup.

As far as I understand different hardware does not matter when the vm is started new on the new host?