I’m picturing open stack being fairly similar to Cloudstack? Cloudstack is nice, but does require some odd networking.

oOooo… Quite interesting.

If you are intending to use it, I have some thoughts about the way that you should get it setup and running.

First thing I would look into is getting the iDrac reset and working. iDrac is intended to allow you to view the display of the server without connecting a monitor, simply use a web page. It also allows you to power on/off the server remotely even if it is frozen or off. It is a simple web interface that allows you to control it.

After that, I have some questions about your intention for this server. If you are intending to use this server as a hypervisor, I would like to take just a moment to shill for Apache Cloudstack. I recently setup a server running this and it is going absolutely wonderfully. The reason I chose to use it is it is more open to DevOps workloads, by default compatible with Terraform and takes literally 5 minutes to setup an entire Kubernetes cluster. However, the networking behind it is a bit more advanced and if you want more detail just ask me. For now, suffice it to say that it is capable of running 201 vlans protected by virtual routers.

If that is too much to bite off for a hypervisor at one time, then Proxmox is the way to go. You can probably see a few videos from Linus Tech Tips involving that software. It has much simpler networking and can get you up and running in no time.

Finally, if you are intending to learn something a little more professionally viable, then I would talk to your boss about utilizing an unused VMWare license or perhaps working with Hyper-V(my least favorite option).

If you do intend a Hypervisor, then I would highly recommend setting up a raid. Now, the type of RAID depends highly on what you want. RAID 5 will probably work for a homelab, but I would still recommend a RAID 10. RAID 5 gives you more storage space, but I like the performance benefits of a RAID 10. I think that it is very important when multiple virtual devices are sharing the same storage. You can read more about the various RAID levels here: https://www.prepressure.com/library/technology/raid

Can’t say I’ve used that… Yet. I like nextcloud because besides being compatible with Linux/Windows and having an Android app, it also has a simple web UI to access the files. It’s probably closer to self hosted OneDrive than anything else I can think of. Kinda like the simplicity of pairdrop though.

Hell yeah, it will. I need one of those bad boys.

Hah. I see your looking into ZFS caching. Highly recommend. I’m running Ubuntu 24.04 Root on ZFS RAID10. Twelve each data drives and one nvme cache drive. Gotta say it’s performing exceptionally. ZFS is a bit tricky, it requires an HBA not a RAID card. You may to to flash the raid card to get it working like I did. After that, I have put together a GitHub for the install on ZFS RAID 10, but you should easily be able to change it to RAIDz2. Fair warning, it wipes the drives entirely.

https://github.com/Reddimes/ubuntu-zfsraid10/

Do you have any hosting in your home lab? Preferably something for running a docker container, but a hypervisor could do the job too.

Nextcloud is an option if you do. Technically speaking you could properly protect it and make it public. You don’t have to do that though. Any file you upload on your computer could be copied to your phone or vice versa. If it’s public, then this could be done from anywhere.

I seed what you did there.

Thanks for the insight!

I may have to resort to using BTRFS for this host eventually if ZFS fails me. I do not expect a lot of duplication on a host, even if I have it, who cares I have 60 TB despite the raid 10 architecture. Having something with kernel support may be a better approach anyways.

It’s interesting to me that it struggles with raid 5 and 6 though. I would have expected that to be easy to provide.

BTRFS is a damn good option too. I’m happy to hear how easy it is to use. I haven’t used it(yet), I went with ZFS because of its flexible architecture. On a desktop level, BTRFS makes sense, but in a server? What is it like in a Hypervisor?

I’m working on standing up a Cloudstack host as a Hypervisor. Now, I want this host to be able to run 5 kubernetes VMs, so it needs to have quick access to the disks. Now, I do not have a RAID card, only an HBA. In such a scenario, I would typically use a RAID 10. But a ZFS Raid 10 outperforms an mdraid 10 anyways (in terms of writing, not necessarily reading). So that is what I’ve decided. It may not be a good idea, it may not even be feasible. But I’m heckin willing to give it a shot.

I’m actually jealous that you automatically have built in kernel support though. I am a little curious about BTRFS in terms of how(or if) it connects multiple disks, I’m simply uninformed.

ZFS Performance Sauce

Install Ubuntu 24.04 on ZFS RAID 10 - Github Repository

Edit: There are a few drawdowns to using ZFS, lousy docker performance being one that I’ve heard about. I’m curious how this will be affected if I have docker running inside a VM.

That’s fair. I chose ZFS because I’ve used it before. And understand it fairly well already. I know nothing about BTRFS, so perhaps you could educate me a little. I’m working on setting up a cloudstack host using ZFS RAID 10. Does BTRFS have a flexible architecture to where you could do something similar?

Edit: Perhaps you could also inform me of the speeds of BTRFS too. From what I understand, ZFS outperforms BTRFS in large datasets, but I don’t know where the cutoff is. I’ll let you know it would need to run 12 ea 10TB HDDs.

Try Root on ZFS.

If you run into an issue suddenly, you can restore to snapshot.

Uh… I don’t have a separate partition for /home. I have a separate zfs filesystem for it though. If I run into issues, I can restore from snapshot and not affect it.

Oh great… Look at the GNUguy. Here he is walking around all GNUde. He’s gonna come over demanding GNUggets of wisdom. And I’m just gonna say it, hell GNUpe, leave me alone to compile my thoughts in peace.

This comment was purely for fun, isn’t even funny, and frankly laughable. But it seemed like a good time for some word play. ✌️

This account is less than a month old and has a ton of downvotes (100+). Even says that Trump always tells the truth even when he is on record saying the opposite. This is a bot.

Funny enough I lived in Texas and also moved to Denver. However, I would say that yes it is more expensive, but the wage is significantly higher. I was making 25k in Texas to the point where I couldn’t afford my mortgage anymore. But moving to Denver, I was making 55k.