I added a new PC (system76 Thelio Prime) as a node to make a Proxmox cluster, and in doing so expand the services and robustness of my home lab. Equipped similarly with 24 virtual CPU cores and 64 GB RAM as the original host, except being AMD Ryzen 9900X with PCIe 5.0 for higher IOPS.
The second NVMe slot on the mini-ITX motherboard being PCIe 4.0 – and hence likely in a separate IOMMU group – gave me an unexpected advantage of being able to make it my future network-attached SSD by passing that controller through to TrueNAS in a VM, hosting Nextcloud. This makes for an insanely powerful NAS compared to the Synology DS-1019+. A similarly powerful pre-built one would have cost thousands of dollars just to get the processing capability and otherwise would be overkill in the number of drive bays and thus fan noise and power consumption. A single backed-up SSD is adequate for me; and as a courtesy reminder – RAID is not a backup plan.
Next year will add an additional performance tier of onsite backups using ZFS snapshots to TrueNAS Mini R ZRAID pool 3 × 6TB, in addition to the existing file-level onsite backups to Synology DS-1019+ BTRFS pool 5 × 4TB over NFS.
The NVIDIA 4060 Ti GPU pass-through enabled a gorgeous Ubuntu remote desktop for when I need to work in Linux, so I don’t have to rely solely on Windows Services for Linux (WSL) on my portable computer. This being unstable over RDP has been set aside as of this writing. I use Spiral Linux (or Bodhi Linux for slimmer) if I need a GUI but not necessarily remote desktop.
These are of course just some of the building blocks and more services are becoming production ready for 2025.
Lessons learnt:
My next PC would definitely not have a motherboard that maxes out at 64 GB (effectively just over 60 GB) RAM. 128 GB is more appropriate for how much processor you’re leaving on the table without the RAM to utilize it in typical loads. The computer hardware itself is the relatively easy part, the bigger consideration when acquiring an additional host is power, both as in consumption and reliable availability thereof, plus accessories, as I will discuss in my next post.