For many years, I had a Dell PowerEdge 710 as the compute node of my home lab. In 2021 I finally decided to cross-grade to a cluster and reduce power consumption. I bought 3 Dell OptiPlex Micros and went about the process of migrating all of my VMs from ESXi to xcp-ng. Now I’m saving a little power, and I have the flexibility to rolling upgrades and HA. The nodes are still using shared storage on the TrueNAS server (like ESXi was). The only real limitation is that everything is restricted to a single 1G Ethernet on each node. So far, this hasn’t been an issue, even when doing Live Migrations, but I’d like to get some mGig gear and get the storage server connected over 10G again.
Here’s the basic blocks of the current lab environment.
