One Server to Rule Them All

I’ve been slowly stripping my homelab down. Kubernetes to Docker was the first move. Three servers to one is the second.

For a while, I had it split on purpose. One box for monitoring, one for Ansible, one for everything else I test at home. Different environments, different blast radius. Break something on the Ansible box, the rest doesn’t care.

Then I actually looked at what the hardware was doing.

The main box runs on an i9-9900K with 64GB of RAM. It was barely breaking a sweat. Meanwhile I had two mini PCs sitting there, each pulling power, each needing updates, each adding one more thing to check when something went wrong.

Three servers wasn’t really about capacity. It was about having separate spaces to break things in. But separate spaces have a cost too, more to patch, more to monitor, more places for something to quietly go wrong.

So I collapsed it. Everything now runs on the one Proxmox host. The mini PCs are going up for sale.

The nice side effect: there’s still plenty of headroom left. If I want to test something, I just spin up another VM instead of reaching for different hardware. Same “break things without messing up the rest” idea, just inside one box now instead of three. No extra power draw, no extra box to SSH into at 2am when something’s acting up.

Two things still on the list. A GPU, eventually, for running local AI models, not urgent, just sitting on the roadmap. And moving the NAS from AlmaLinux to Debian, because ZFS and kernel upgrades on AlmaLinux have fought me one too many times. That one’s a post of its own.

For now, one server is doing the job three used to.