homelab

· erock's devlog

A decided to convert my gaming rig into a virtualization server using proxmox and make this post a "living document".

status (2024-07-31) #

I'm finally in a place where I think things are mostly working properly. Let's start from the beginning.

To start, I built a new services VM, cpu, where all of my containers live for various web services. It's also a place where I'm going to be doing some self-hosting of public facing services.

I was having a bunch of issues getting LXC to connect to my nas VM and tried bunch of techniques and eventually got something working. However, in doing that I realized that it was kind of silly to have a nas vm -- that's just running zfs -- when I could just have my proxmox host -- that's also running zfs -- do it instead. They were both running zfs+debian so it felt silly to deal with a nas VM and hdd passthrough.

So I exported my nas zfs pool and imported it into my proxmox host, which worked great! Except I then had another problem: ashift was misconfigured. Darn, that means I need to rebuild my zfs pool.

So I got my old synology out and did data exiltration / infiltration on a fresh zfs pool. There, I think I have everything setup, until I rebooted proxmox after a kernel update: zfs datasets are empty. wtf? After hours messing around with it -- even rebuilding the zfs pool again from scratch -- I figured out what was wrong: I encrypted the disks and didn't mount with the correct flag zfs mount -l -a. Yea, I felt like an idiot.

Now everything is working. I'm still noticing occassional high load / high io when saving a bunch of files to the fs (e.g. package updates). Let's hope I can figure it out. My current suspicion it might be using proxmox with zfs in a 2-disk mirror pool? Not sure.

status (2024-06-25) #

Everything is setup and working really well. I knew GPU passthrough was going to be challenging but I eventually got it to work after about 8-hours of trial-and-error.

Overall really excited about having a system and UI dedicated to virtualization. I plan on distro-hopping a lot more now that it's trivial for me to spin up new VMs.

I'll keep updating this post with more status updates.

Here's a pic of my rack:

homelab

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