2-node Proxmox cluster w/o HA

In my last post, I mentioned that utilizing an R720 24/7 for my mission critical services was:

1. Being far too underutilized
2. Pulling more watts when idle than I’d like

I really needed it just for VMs or configurations that used more resources than I had at the time, such as Eve-NG. Making another Proxmox host seemed to be my best bet in separating what’s 24/7 necessary and what isn’t. I wanted something power efficient, small enough to fit in a rack shelf, and with enough headroom for more services down the line. I landed on a Dell Optiplex 7010 DT. (Not the new one from 2024) ((Very dumb decision from Dell to reuse the name))

The specs on this Optiplex is:

• Core i7 3770 4c/8t 3.4GHz
• 16Gb DDR3 1600MHz RAM
  • The manual says it only supports 16Gb, but online I’ve seen some people have success with running 32Gb total
• 2 x 256Gb Sata SSD running in Raid 0

While managing 2 separate Proxmox installs would have been easy because it’s only 2 hosts, I wanted to learn about node clustering because I tend to see that being used at the datacenter. Proxmox itself generally only likes having 3-node clustering to maintain quorum between the nodes. Which before this I didn’t know quorum was a thing, let alone maintaing it to avoid split-brain between nodes. It was definitely a learning experience to understand how clustering servers worked, and I haven’t even done it “correctly”.

Will write the rest later.