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.

As I outlined in my first blog post on the topic, I want to build a new backup server, and I want to explore the different options I have. This project included a lot of testing, and will eventually culminate in actually building and setting up a proper backup system. It’s definitely an important and often overlooked part of a homelab, or even small business networks. Ideally, I can also get a functional offsite backup working, but that might be a future project.

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.

I’m experimenting with Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE), the same hypervisor I run on my Minilab. It supports clustering and high availability, and I’d like to implement the cluster option. Clustering without HA allows multiple nodes to be managed from a single user interface, and for VMs to be offline migrated between nodes. This sounds pretty useful for me, even without the high availability features like live migration. However, any cluster relies on a node voting scheme which requires agreement (quorum) from all of the nodes, and the cluster won’t function without quorum being met.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is quite a buzz-word now in enterprise computing, and it’s something I’d like to experiment more with in my homelab. Essentially, it’s a new way to describe old school terminal servers, but with modern features and marketing. The primary difference is that VDI normally implies that each ‘seat’ is a virtual machine and has some resources associated with it, as opposed to a terminal session running on a shared server.

I’ve been working up to a better virtualization and storage setup for my homelab for awhile now. One part of this is cataloguing my media and expanding the virtual side of the media library. I have a legacy collection of DVDs and BDs which I’d like to import, and that means I need to rip them from disk. The decryption and transcoding process requires a decent CPU. The demand for high performance leads me to want to run this in a virtual machine (where it can get low priority access to a wealth of compute resources), but the need for a physical disk drive also makes me not want to walk down to the basement every time a disk is done to change disks.

Inspired by recent a recent video on the basics of PXE booting by ‘Tall Paul Tech’ (formerly known as CWNE88), as well as a comment by Linus of Linus Tech Tips that his new home server could ’network boot everything in his house’, I wondered how easy it would be to network boot everything in my house. In an ideal world, this would solve a lot of problems regarding managing backups of the drives - by simply not having drives at any client, they can all be managed and backed up centrally by the server.

After my experience with FreeBSD Jails and LXC containers, I wanted to get into ‘real’ virtualization - and all of the advantages that come with it, like VM snapshot and restore features, moving VMs around between my workstation and production environment, and separating my storage from my compute. To this end, I built the Minilab, a small scale virtualization lab that will be at home in any house or appartment.