10 Watt HA Proxmox Cluster ft. ZimaBoard

"...Because i can and because i'm nerd..." :)

I have a similar setup, but use the Lenovo mini-pcs with I5's and 16gb RAM, SSD + NVME, a great setup. Expandable to 32gb on each node, things work great.

Just need some fast shared storage now.

3xN100 will cost the same price with 512 ssd and 16GB of ram.... While being 4 times faster, and drinking a little more power at 15W..... I can see no reason for those N3450

zimaboard is EXTREMLY overpriced, instead go for CHUWI Larkbox for 150 euros you get a N100 running at full power and 12gb of ddr5 and 512gb ssd with 2 ports 2.5gb and 6 usb very powerful for the money you pay.

Running Proxmox and a VM just to run Kubernetes in HA seems like an over kill. You are running HA container management on top of HA hypervisor. Why not just install an OS that supports cephfs and install Kubernetes on top. Just need to be sure that your etcd cluster spans all three nodes and each node is schedulable for workloads. One node goes down and Kubernetes can move the workload without having to first move Kubernetes and then the workload. Not as much fun but less hassle in the long run.

This is nothing new for me, as I used to work for Novell that had "PlateSpin Orchestrate". What I do find interesting is the fact that now this is commonplace and available for everyone. It's like working for Volvo when they invented the seatbelt and then a few years later knowing every person can use them. Now PlateSpin has another flavor called Migrate, which does what it says in the tin, takes your machines into someone else's computer (i.e. the cloud). I moved from Novell to IBM and then Amazon, the main things I've learnt are that the fundamental theorem of software engineering is applicable to everything, that less is more and that K.I.S.S. is for your (and others') own safety. Good content, take care.

Nice toy BUT it almost killed me to see the single switch everything runs through ;-)

Such a great video. I’m doing the exact same thing with intel nuc. I use ceph at work and I despise it, but seeing how simple it is inside of proxmox has convinced me to try it at home.

This is amazing, thanks for sharing this architecture

I plan to go K8s native, no proxmox. Using something cheap as Control plane, and this zima boards as workers. Let's see how it goes.,

F**k, f**k, fuuuuuuuuuuuuck. I wanted HA with ceph, but I listen to reddit guys who told me that I was going to need a lot of CPU and that 16gb of memory was not enough... so I went with zfs, which forces me to setup replication and also takes a lot of ram. Dam!

How do I run one VM across all three nodes in my cluster to take advantage of all cores?

I have a question... how those zima boards works in 24[7 schedule?
and what doing on if your zima1 (for example) with ssd has been down? how you connect ssd as ha nas?

I am trying to do something similar with three Gigabyte Brix machines, but I'm running into issues because creating an OSD seems to require an empty disk (ie, it won't accept the disk where the os is). Did you partition the zima drive somehow before install?

I started to set up an HA ProxMox cluster, and got stuck at the "Fencing" part. Is fencing optional, or does it just seem more intimidating than it is?

@Raid Owl please please make in-depth proxmox tutorial I am struggling to understand the LVM stuff I use EX4, and for instance, if something happens to the system and I plugged that hard disk into a working system, how do I access the files that were inside that proxmox that are like LVM? I don't know. There's just no really good in-depth proximox tutorial. There's a few but a really good one I think a lot of people would really like that

My suggestion would be using low power cluster as backup.. Maybe consider using a setup like this:


Cluster A (High Power) - Node A1, Node A2
Cluster B (Lower Power) - Node B1, Node B2


HA - Cluster A and Cluster B (maybe cross wired) for efficient and more practical usecase.. This will also make sense in regards to performance per watt.

"Or if you want an actual good video ..." lol, that took me by surprise - good to have a sense of humour!

Zima boar support mikrotik router os or not sir 😅😅

Great job - done by the italien munks ;)

If you want to save money and power you could use 3 thinkpads.

ceph with gigabit link .... lol. 😂😂😂😂😂

I'm lost on how you are able to setup HA mode when the storage is local on each device. I have a similar setup and I want to do that.

Can anyone point me in the right direction with clear instructions? Or explain in detail for me?

Good idea❤❤❤❤❤❤

I don't like channels like this - they are expensive to watch. now I need to buy 3 Zima boards to do the same ! 😢

I really want to like the Zima board, but the pcie slot sticking out bugs me. Especially with such a nice looking case/heatsink design

Hi there, 
is it possible to daisy chain zimaboards since all of them have 2 ethernet ports or is it neccessary to connect all of them to a switch?

The ZimaBoard could have been straight up God tier if it had built-in NVME support. Installing a PCI-E add-in card doesn't count.

Cool. I dig it. 🔥

Man proxmox is so good!!

Can you run pfSense on a Proxmox cluster?
Having a highly available router/firewall seems like a neat solution

I installed proxmox on my Zimmaboard on emmc too. Question is how long will it last until it dies. There’s maybe a reason emmc not being supported

These are trash. Lenovo M900 Tiny is much better despite not having 36TB expandable storage. Its also cheaper, even with 16 GB of ram.

Ayee, that map screenshot shows my house. What a small world.
I need to set something like this up, but w/ more power than the ZimaBoards. I know all the options, but it's hard balancing performance vs cost vs efficiency. Thanks for the vid!

This doesn't make any sense. Yes awesome 10W cluster for the sake of clustering, but Proxmox or virtualization is the incorrect application. How does it show any benefits of ZimaBoard whatsoever?

Why not using harvester instead of proxmox ?

Thank you, another rabbit hole for me to go in.

This is such a cool project. Hadn't taken this board seriously until you posted this but now I keep thinking about it as I'm trying to adjust my new southern, basement-less lifestyle where I'm baking my wife in her office with my homelab servers.

"...it sits about 10Watts total.." What hardware/software do you use to monitor these SBC's? Fantastic info. Time to give Proxmox a try (been using UNRAID for years now).

Love your videos but let's be honest, you didn't purchased any of those... And prices in EU are forbidden for these specs.

yep, these boards are pretty cewl. but still in germany its cheaper to rent a vps than run these xD

Would this be a good design for a micro super computer in a small pelican case? Something better than a standard laptop.

you know what would be cool?

For you to do some sort of collab video with techno tim/

idk maybe some sort of unraid to unraid server replication guide??? maybe a wireguard tutorial ?? Doesnt have to be something groundbreaking or complex, just the idea of getting you two on a video with some friendly bantering and dark sarcastic humor on your side, (to see if you get tim to break out into LoL's) could be of fun to watch

Thanks !!

Hehe, quite under powered. My ceph OSD servers alone are dual 2nd gen Xeon Gold, 384GB, 0.5PB storage, 1x 1.6TB nvme, 100GB ethernet. R740XD2s. About 50 of them. Erasure Code 8+2.

Best practices to disable PG Autoscale. It has killed a lot go ceph clusters.

what is the device you are displaying the power usage with, please ?

Crazy good. Exactly what i was looking for

You could buy for that money a much better system. For an example, for 120-150 Dollar, u could get a refurbed lenovo thinkcentre m700 with core i5 like 6400t or 6500t, 8 GB RAM and 256GB SSDs, and it takes only 15-25 watt with a much better perfomance rate. You''ll get also a clean case and so on.