So you want to turn your one or two Proxmox nodes into a small Proxmox cluster? What do you need to know about quorum, especially as it pertains to really small clusters of 2 and 3 nodes? In this video, I go over the different ways to stabilize a 2-node cluster for high availability, the storage requirements for high available VMs, installing a QDevice using a Raspberry Pi, and if you even need one.

I recently tried to install Proxmox on my Dell Wyse 3040 thin client so it can act as a cluster member, since it’s arguably easier to setup a full Proxmox install on x64 based devices than it is to setup a QDevice. Proxmox has a great installer, you have the full GUI to manage the node (not that you need to do much with it as a QDevice), and you have the option of setting it up for other Proxmox services and containers even if it’s really not very capable.

For my last trick, I setup a multi-user thin client where each user account was connected to a specific virtual machine. This is great, but if you have a lot of thin clients you might not want to create a ton of VMs and might instead want each user in the system to have one or more VMs. Well, Josh Patten has written a Python-based GUI to select thin clients which you have access to, and today we are going to turn that into an appliance on both a Raspberry Pi and an actual x86 based Thin Client (running Debian).

After really enjoying my trio of Dell Wyse 5060 Thin Clients, I bought another cheap one to see how it compares, and hopefully to give advice to the many commenters. The 5060 was a great value for $35 but it’s hard to find at that price normally, while the 3040 is always available for that price, physically much smaller, and also worse on paper. It has a quad-core Intel CPU, 2G of RAM, and was advertised as having an 8G SSD but mine is actually 16G.

I’ve made many videos on Thin Clients before, all of them relying on Proxmox and the SPICE protocol. This works well when you control both the client and the hypervisor, and allows a lot of flexibility in the guest OS at the expense of flexibility at the client. If you want to rely on a remote access / Bring-Your-Own-Device type solution, you probably care more about solid multi-platform client support than flexibility in mixing VM OSes and running with no software installation on the VM.

I’ve been playing with the Dell Wyse 5060 I bought before and I …. might have bought a few more. I was so impressed by the performance for $35, the CPU and GPU were very functional, and the system had enough SSD storage and RAM to do actual real work. So, considering people have tried to run Proxmox on the Raspberry Pi 4, these things must be adequate for a Proxmox HA cluster.

In previous posts, I’ve been building up a thin client / VDI infrastructure based on Proxmox hosted virtual machines, using the SPICE protocol. This has gone well. However, the current setup basically launches the computer into a purely thin client mode, where it’s hardcoded to a specific VM and can do nothing else. There has been some interest in making some kind of launcher to select VMs to log in to, and I decided to find a solution for this.

As promised in my previous blog post on the topic, the SPICE protocol is capable of USB redirection. I didn’t dive into it for that post, but now the future is here and I’ve added USB redirection to my Raspberry Pi thin client. I’ve tested it with USB flash drives, webcams, and pretty much all of the USB devices I could find. And I’m here to tell you how it all works.

I recently was browsing eBay for used computer parts (as one does) and I found how cheap some used thin clients are. These are mini desktops with minimal IO which are designed to act as a modern terminal for modern VDI setups, something like Citrix or Microsoft Remote Desktop based enterprise systems. The thin client itself just has to deal with the local displays, keyboard, mouse, and local USB ports, the actual computation is done on a server somewhere else.

As part of my series exploring backup options, I’m exploring the options for pulling a backup of a Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) host to TrueNAS SCALE server. In this case, PVE host has local ZFS storage, and the TrueNAS system is acting as the backup server. Ideally, PVE would snapshot in ZFS and we could sync those snapshots with a TrueNAS Data Replication task, but PVE doesn’t use the ZFS snapshot features by default.