As with any good engineer, I cannot leave well enough alone. My current rainy day project is reconfiguring my home lab for some much needed updates and simplification.
What’s Wrong?
My home lab is, well, still going strong. My automation scripts work well, and I don’t spend a ton of time doing what I need to do to keep things up to date, at least when it comes to my Kubernetes clusters.
The other servers, however, are in a scary spot. Everything is running on top of the free version of Windows Hyper-V Server from 2019, so general updates are a concern. I would LOVE to move to Windows Server 2025, but I do not have the money for that kind of endeavor.
The other issue with running a Windows Server is that, well, they usually expected a Windows Domain (or, at least, my version does). This requirement has forced me to run my own domain controllers for a number of years now. Earlier iterations of my lab included a lot of Windows VMs, so the domain helped me manage authentication across them all. But, with RKE2 and Kubernetes running the bulk of my workloads, the domain controllers are more hassle than anything right now.
The Plan
My current plan is to migrate my home server to Proxmox. It seems a pretty solid replacement for Hyper-V, and has a few features in it that I may use in the future, like using cloud-init for creating new cluster nodes and better management of storage.
Obviously, this is going to require some testing, and luckily, my old laptop is free for some experimentation. So I installed Proxmox there and messed around, and I came up with an interesting plan.
- Migrate my VMs to my laptop instance of Proxmox, reducing the workload as much as I can.
- Install Proxmox on my server
- Create a Proxmox cluster with my laptop and server as the nodes.
- Transfer my VMs from the laptop node to the server node.
Cutting my Workload
My laptop is a paltry 32GB of RAM, compared to 288 GB in my server. While I need to get everything “over” to the laptop, it doesn’t all have to be running at the same time.
For the windows VMs, my current plan is as follows:
- Move my primary domain controller to the laptop, but run at a reduced capacity (1 CPU/2GB).
- Move my backup DC to the laptop, shut it down.
- Move and shut down both SQL Server instances: they are only running lab DBs, nothing really vital.
For my clusters, I’m not actually going to “move” the VMs. I’m going to create new nodes on the laptop proxmox, add them to the clusters, and then deprovision the old ones. This gives me some control over what’s there.
- Non-Production Cluster -> 1 control plane server, 2 agents, but shut them down.
- Internal Cluster -> 1 control plane server (down from 3), 3 agents, all shut down.
- Production Cluster -> 1 control plane (down from 3), 2 agents, running vital software. I may need to migrate my HC Vault instance to the production cluster just to ensure secrets stay up and running.
With this setup, I should really only have 4 VMs running on my laptop, which it should be able to handle. Once that’s done, I’ll have time to install and configure Proxmox on the server, and then move VMs from the laptop to the server.
Lots to do
I have a lot of learning to do. Proxmox seems pretty simple to start, but I find I’m having to read a lot about the cloning and cloud-init pieces to really make use of the power of the tool.
Once I feel comfortable with Proxmox, the actual move will need scheduled… So, maybe by Christmas I’ll actually have this done.