Rebuilding my home lab with Proxmox

[brwainer]

In the past I posted about how I was planning to move to Veeam Backup and Replication on my HyperV servers, and was also looking into the Microsoft Action Pack. Since then, I have decided that I don't really want to be spending that much money on software, and after looking into Proxmox more closely, decided to pull the trigger on migrating away from Windows entirely. The one thing I'm really sad to leave behind is Storage Spaces, I love how flexible it is regarding different storage types, and that Tiered storage lets you use the SSDs as usable space and not just cache or as a seperate pool entirely.

 

So here's my general plan:

• Set up a temporary Proxmox host
• Rebuild or convert VMs from the HyperV hosts to the temporary ProxMox host
• Install Proxmox on the old primary servers and migrate VMs back to them
• Eventually, not part of this project per se, move all my desktops to Linux and use Windows within VMs for the things that need it (some games, and Adobe Creative Suite)

Reminder of my current setup:

• RPC-2304 with a Supermicro X10SLM-F, E3-1230v3, 32GB RAM, name "Reptar" - primary home server
• CSE-813MTQ with an Asrockrack E3C224D2I, E3-1220v3, 16GB RAM, name "Mountain" - primary backup server, located at my home
• DS380 with an Asrockrack E3C224D4I-14S, E3-1220v3, 32GB RAM, name "Disney" - remote server
• Reptar and Disney host VMs. Reptar replicates to Mountain, which then extends the replication to Disney. Disney replicates to Mountain only. Disney and Mountain both do daily backups. Therefore I have both within-10-minutes replication of VMs at both sites, and daily backups also at both sites.

My progress so far:

• Bought a workstation/server with a KGPE-D16 motherboard, 40GB RAM, and 2x Opteron 6136. Upgraded the CPUs to 2x 6220. Name "Kelly".
  • After I am done using this server as a temporary host for this transition, I hope to use it for "2/3/4 Gamers 1(2) CPU" and/or PCoIP/thin client type computing
• Installed Proxmox on Kelly and played around until I was comfortable with creating and modifying VMs, taking and restoring backups, and set GPU and USB card passthrough into a VM as a proof of concept (I got it working after a reasonable amount of effort)
• Removed Mountain from the HyperV replication, so now Reptar and Disney replicate to each other directly. Installed Proxmox on Mountain and practiced replication between the two Proxmox hosts.
• Rebuilt 2 of my 4 AD-DC VMs using CentOS and Samba on the Proxmox hosts. That was a royal pain - there is a lot of steps that could easily be streamlined into the setup scripts/programs that they have you run, and the instructions and issue fixes are all over the place.
• Starting moving several other VMs to Proxmox

I'm looking forward to the release of Proxmox 5, but I'm not going to wait for it to release before really moving things over. I am anxious a bit about the day when I cut-over to the new VMs, for now I have everything still running on the HyperV hosts and I'm basically just duplicating the services.

[unijab]

Going well?

[brwainer]

47 minutes ago, unijab said:

Going well?

Still working on getting all the VMs rebuilt - I'm trying to migrate as little as possible. Which means that I'm finding all sorts of little things that I've set up over the last few years that I don't remember how to set up anymore and have to look up.