buildmylab

Fair enough! Existing tools are great, but building something tailored just fits my workflow much better. Since I rely on it daily, I’ll be actively maintaining it anyway—use whatever works best for you!

Good call on the passthrough trap! Fortunately, I don’t use any device passthrough in my environment, so migrations won’t be an issue.

The 15-minute ZFS sync is definitely a neat approach, but my main driver for network storage is that I already have a fairly large storage pool on the Synology that I want to put to good use. Keeping storage centralized just fits my backup and maintenance workflow a lot better. Thanks.

Thanks, this is really helpful feedback! I actually never considered USB NICs on the Synology because of the extra power draw and stability concerns, so sticking with native dual 1GbE (via LACP or MPIO) into a 2.5G switch is definitely my plan.

Indeed. With 2 nodes I’ll need to keep enough headroom for migrations if one goes down. Both hosts should normally stay online, but failure and maintenance capacity are definitely things I need to account for.

I’m also planning to monitor the whole setup through OpsHome NOC — both Proxmox hosts, workloads, Synology storage, and related services — so I can get a centralized view from my phone or web console wherever I am.

Thanks for the reminder!

That makes a lot of sense. I already have a Synology DS920+, so there’s no additional storage hardware cost on my end. The Tiny form factor is ideal for me mainly due to footprint and low noise, but total cost and idle power are definitely things I’m weighing.

Another route I’m considering is picking up just one more Tiny instead of two, and running an external Corosync QDevice directly on the DS920+ (via a lightweight Docker container) for the tiebreaker vote. That gives me a proper 2-node quorum without the hardware cost and power draw of a third physical node. Combined with the DS920+ for shared iSCSI storage, that might actually hit the sweet spot between cost, footprint, and HA.

Appreciate the reply! I’ve been running this Tiny for 2 years now and it’s been rock solid. My main hesitation is really finding the right price-to-performance sweet spot between compute and storage. Does this 3-node + Synology setup feel like a sensible middle ground, or am I overpaying/overthinking it?

Thanks for the heads-up.

100% agree in theory! A calendar should be enough, but human nature and silent auto-renew failures always win. This is basically an automated safety net to save future-me from current-me. 😄