Overview

Over the holidays I spent much of my time working on my Homelab. My goal for 2021 is to move all my containerized services over to a HA Kubernetes cluster. Currently this cluster is running on a single bare-metal server. However in the future I would like this cluster to be spread across multiple physical servers to prevent any downtime due to hardware upgrades or maintances.

The issue with having a cluster of servers running my containerized apps is sharing any persistent data between them. Because we have multiple Kubernetes client nodes, with no guarentee as to which node will be running the container, I set out to find the simplest shared storage solution possible.

With the Covid pandemic keeping me at home the majority of the day, I have been sinking a lot of time into creating “the perfect homelab.” The bulk of my time is spent doing research and planning out which piece of hardware to purchase next. One of my favorite activities when doing research is to browse for servers/components on classified adds and get upset and the ridiculous prices people are asking for old and outdated block heaters. Recently I decided to search for the keyword “supermicro” on one of these sites. Supermicro is my goto brand for custom home server simply because of its availability and industry features. It also happens to be the brand of the first motherboard I used when building my first NAS back in 2012. Getting back onto subject, I stumbled across a listing for a diskless NAS server with all the features my current NAS has (AES hardware accelerated encryption, Error Correcting RAM/CPU and IPMI). So I purchase the machine and thus a new server was added to my collection.

Introduction

Prior to the summer 2017 I was known for hosting services for just about anything friends had a minor interest for (lots of minecraft servers). Due to major life changes, I sold most of my hardware and left what ever remaining servers powerd off in storage. During christmas of 2019, I had taken 2-weeks off of work and for the first time in months I had free time to myself. I finally decided to pull out my NAS server I assembled back in 2013.