The failover works well enough that I trust my lab workloads on it, and the difference in noise is amazing, haha! After replacing the fans on my MD1200, the whole lab is virtually silent at the moment. I’d started looking into ceph, but I think I need to upgrade the local storage in all of the boxes before I go too deep down that rabbit hole.

I ended up just using NFS shares for most of my storage for… Well, everything, haha, as it seems to preform well enough with 10Gbe, and it’s way easier than bothering with setting up ISCSi. My old storage server VM now runs on bare metal (an R430) and I’ve transitioned all of my other workloads to a cluster of old Optiplex devices that I’ve added 2x10Gb/s NICs to, with the exception of a couple of virtual “AI” workstation VMs that I have running on an old Gaming PC I bought of my roomate for $400 (not bad for a Ryzen 3600 and a 1080ti, I think?) Pretty well, thanks for asking! I did end up settling on Proxmox with a few slight modifications, though I ended up completely restructuring my lab in the process.

Proxmox backup to backblaze