Until something goes wrong in your stack, and then you're despairing.
That's why I run a cluster and tight backups. I can recover
- Cluster Fail over
- Offsite restic backup
- NAS VM backup
I want to upgrade to 3 MS-A2 but they are much more expensive (about $1350 per box) but a lot more powerful 2.5x the passmark score, 96GB DDR5 vs 32GB DDR4, and would have raid 1 NVME 2TB instead of a single 2TB nvme. It would also allow me to connect them directly to my 10Gbit SFP+ backbone. The power draw a lot higher though.
I have not yet explored the likes of kubernetes, I don't have enough hardware. :D
I have old hardware running my unraid "mainbox", a 10c, 20T 10th gen intel with 128gb of ram, and a lot of spinning rust, and 2 m.2 drives for caching.
The most important data from that then goes to an ancient qnap I have, where it is mirrored two two seperate disks.
Then there's a nightly sync to a 10TB USB attached HDD. If the house is burning down, that's what we grab. It has every photo we've ever taken, every document we've ever considered important.
And then for the most critical stuff, there's an rsync offsite back up.
Because I primarily use my NAS as a store of photo stuff, my next one is likely to be all flash (and will need at least 2.5GB Ethernet) - but I will need to upgrade my router. The house is already wired with short runs of CAT6e, so I just need to upgrade the router, and maybe my switch.
The patch panel should be fine, but that was set up by pros when they did the PoE cameras for me. I am not a homelab "guy" or a sys admin by any means, I just pay enough attention to this stuff.
I am using Proxmox for clustering at the VM level, not docker. Kubernetes is a nightmare and wouldn't recommend it for most people.
Noted, a friend of mine is a sys eningeer and uses Kubernetes. So, its all I know in that field. Whenever I upgrade (I probably need to change a few CMOS batteries!) I will consider whether learning Proxmox for my small scale is worth it :D
proxmox is free and stupid simple to setup a cluster and just works like a champ. Highly recommend it.
proxmox rules!!! Just back that up in case your power supply blows and you have to rebuild!!