RAM prices aren't coming down, but upgrade was long overdue
Long time reader, first time poster
Finally decided to pull the plug and rebuild my homelab before RAM and storage prices get any higher than they are now, as they sure don't seem to be coming down.
Biggest struggle was consolidation of storage into a dedicated NAS machine: I moved disks into it from my TrueNAS VM and a QNAP 4-bay NAS, plus some Exos X20 fell off the truck. That required doing a full copy of both my previous zpools back and forth to change the topology.
Sitting very comfortably now at 100TB usable of spinning rust, and 56TB of QLC flash, plus a DB machine for ClickHouse and a big data research hobby with 10TB usable SAS TLC flash. All acquired before the price hike, just never got around to building new machines to put this stuff into, but now I'm afraid that a drive failure will be my ticket to bankruptcy :D
Besides the storage, the whole lab underwent a major overhaul: my previous setup was one Proxmox machine that did everything, including TrueNAS in a VM with a controller passed through. It did well, but the RAM and CPU budget became tight. Plus, I've switched into a KubeOps role a few years back, and now this lonely Proxmox machine was getting neglected a bit, as maintaining it required extra effort on top of my day job.
I wanted to play around with Talos Linux for a while, so that's what I went with. I've restored everything I've set up over the years in about a week, and a few more weeks worth of evenings and weekends were spent fixing small issues with baremetal storage, networking, and VPN (I switched to Netbird from bare Wireguard).
I'll definitely say that the Kubernetes-first approach to homelabbing with such a minimal distro is a bit unique, and I would be reluctant to recommend it, unless you are a sicko like myself and do genuinely enjoy tinkering with Kubernetes. Networking is especially fun.
Now I'm a proud owner of a bare-metal Kubernetes cluster at home, consisting of whoping three computers: NAS, Database box, and the older homelab server, serving as a controlplane now.
And that's way more headroom than I know what to do with, but this is a nice problem to have!
Next project is definitely the networking upgrade, 1Gi worked fine with only the client traffic going through it, but as a cluster network backplane it's very tight...
P.S I also do astrophotography, and this is the biggest storage hog on the HDDs among the data I can't just refetch. Shameless plug, if that's allowed :)
P.P.S AI was used in creation of the gallery website, haha.
