With planning a upgrade to the shed I took the time to look at a cheaper solution to running the current machines. The issue I face daily is Proxmox failing to cope with multiple USB devices without crashing. My amateur radio simplex nodes used to run on Proxmox but now been moved to HP T420 devices. Each node has it’s own hardware. Now there are 3 other projects which needs a home to run on. The HP T620 Thin clients offer me a low power solution. Each one by standards comes with a 4GB DDR3 Ram and a 16GB M.2 SSD they have room to upgrade. Also each node in full power will only use 11W at max load.
First of I started with swapping the memory up to 8GB. The reason for I settled with 8GB despite the units taking 2x 8GB is most the machines I am running only need 2GB. Next I upgraded to a 128GB M.2 SSD as 16GB is not quiet enough to cope with Proxmox. Next up I found trying to boot the USB installer did not want to work. This issue was due to the ISO wanting UEFI boot. I enabled secure boot and then this started to boot and install.
After a quick fire up it was time to start to downloading the ISO’s I use regularly to build each of the servers to run on it. The plan is to make all 5 nodes a cluster with node 1 only being development outside of the shed. The plan is to build and test the config / devices then deploy them to the shed nodes. One of the problems with doing this is I need to make sure the balance of devices using the USB is balanced. The aim is to have 2 devices but with two nodes taking 3 devices. This is because not every device will need USB pass through at the same time.
Time will tell how well the nodes function.