Implementing VLANs in my Homelab: It's all fun and games until the trunk port arrives

It took me quite a while to finally get VLANs. In fact, it took me until about the middle of the migration to finally understand them. No idea why, as once I did understand them, they make a lot of sense. In this post, I will be going over my journey from a network with two subnets, the DMZ and everything else, to a more segmented setup with multiple VLANs....

January 10, 2023 · 18 min · Michael

Ceph MON Migration

In the course of spreading my homelab over a couple more machines, I finally arrived at the Ceph cluster’s MON daemons. These were running on three Ceph VMs on my main x86 server up to now. In this post, I will describe how I moved them to three Raspberry Pis. While the cluster was up the entire time. First, a couple of considerations: MON daemons use on average about 1GB of memory in my cluster My cluster, and most of my services, went down during the migration....

December 26, 2022 · 4 min · Michael

Migrating to 3-node HA for Consul/Vault/Nomad

As mentioned in my previous post on migrating the Consul/Vault/Nomad servers from a VM to a Raspberry Pi, I was still waiting for some more Pis to arrive to extend the Nomad/Consul/Vault clusters to a HA configuration for all three. The main reason for this is not necessarily fault tolerance, but rather gaining the ability to restart the controllers without taking down the entire Nomad cluster. Now I’d like to give a short overview of the experience, and end with a bit of an overview on the resource consumption (spoiler: Raspberry Pi 4 4GB are absolutely sufficient)....

December 25, 2022 · 7 min · Michael

Ceph NFS on ARM64: Not currently possible

Today, I wanted to migrate my single Ceph NFS daemon from my LXD VM on an x86 server to my Hardkernel H3. This did not work out too well. Yesterday, I had finally finished the migration of my Ceph cluster’s MON daemons to my three Raspberry Pi controllers. This move had it’s own problems, which I will detail a bit in another blog entry. Part of this migration was to also move over the MGR daemons to my Pis....

December 21, 2022 · 4 min · Michael

Cluster Controller Migration to a Raspberry Pi 4

I am currently working on distributing my Homelab a little bit more. My main driver is high availability. Do I need high availability in a homelab setup? No, not really. But I was getting annoyed by having to take down the entire Homelab whenever I was doing an update on my single server. The newest part of that project is my cluster controller. That is the machine running the servers for my Vault, Consul and Nomad cluster....

December 10, 2022 · 9 min · Michael