K8sment

This website now lives in my basement, rent-free.

I was generously gifted two R710's, an MD1000, and a custom enclosure. Being of sound mind, I enthusiastically dumped cash money on enhancements.

From the top down:

As for software, the R710 1 carries bare metal Ubuntu 20.04 with a single-node MicroK8s cluster. There is no virtualization here; I want to squeeze hardware performance. All 24 cores and 144GiB RAM are available to the node. Currently the cluster is used for web hosting and game servers, not limited to Enemy Territory, Minecraft, Terraria, and Valheim. A Samba network drive lives alongside the cluster, used for local media. Data is housed in one of the MD1000's two RAID 5 arrays.

The R710 2 is virtualized with Hyper-V Server. This is for experimentation and development, and generally making a lot of mistakes. Not much lives here for long. A virtualized Ubuntu 20.04 server hosts a vsftpd FTP server using the second RAID 5 array of the MD1000.

There is a lot to explore and learn. The cluster needs refinement but I am mostly satisfied. I have yet to configure MetalLB to replace several NodePort exposed services. I should set up cron backups or VolumeSnapshots, but that carries a Can I successfully restore from a backup? implication. I can always add more to the cluster and explore things like code hosting. I could even expand the cluster to 3 nodes to reduce maintenance downtime. However I would prefer each node on separate hardware, so this may involve using the last few rack units for an additional server.