I am in a good place with my proxmox cluster but want to take the next step with my networked storage. I want the ability to take take my HL-15 down for maintenance and tinkering without affecting the rest of my cluster or people watching plex on my storage.
What is the recommended next step? Do I just buy another HL-15 and mirror things in someway, I am not very sure about the mechanics!
Appreciate the help!
context:
1x HL15 - Fully Built & Burned In
3x compute nodes proxmox cluster (setup so I can tinker with an individual node and not effect the kubernetes cluster)
You could look into something like zrep for the “buy another HL-15 and mirror things in some way” route;
but I think some of the approach depends on how much writing is going on to your pool(s) and how seamless you would expect a failover to be (ie, do you expect a plex watcher to experience zero dropped frames and stutter) for the fail over and fail back.
for write loads on the cluster, some unavailability is fine but the k8s containers should be able to heal as if there was a blip in the network
for plex, stuttering is fine as long as it steadies out in the minutes
overall, nothing too stringent, I just want to be able to pull one hl15 for routine maintenance or tinkering without having to declare an outtage window
Great example of architecture tying your hands up.
Running a second HL15 so you can do maintenance or tinker seems borderline insane.
Ceph is complete overkill and fully insane unless you are protecting a workload worth a lot, where downtime costs more. Plex media is pretty easy to replace in a catastrophic failure. Ideally your clients have cached enough of the episode/movie they are currently watching for your maintenance to finish, but this is client/player dependent. Ultimately I have to ask, how often are you bringing the thing down for maintenance?
What is the size of the working set for your containers? If you need 100% uptime on specific services, setup a server for them. You are running into the limitations of a monolithic architecture. I run my NVR separately from my HL15 for this reason.
Consider a dev box for tinkering, doesn’t need to perfectly match.
The fewer dependencies, the better. Figure out where you have created dependencies that make it difficult to maintain this system.
