Lol no kidding. For a while I was thinking about running 3 identical servers in a 'proxmox' cluster for virtual machines using "ceph" for distributed storage. Then any one of the servers could fail and the other two would instantly boot up the virtual machines with no data loss. But then I read more about it and with a small cluster like that (3 is the minimum) the overhead is really high and the disk I/O performance is actually kind of terrible for some very technical reasons if you don't use enterprise SSDs with integrated batteries. So the price tag just kept going up and up and up. And nobody really needs that kind of reliability at home anyway so I ended up with just one server for VMs
Preach . . .
I know this path well and have been on this personal journey for what seems like forever.
In my home the main priority has been achieving the lowest energy consumption possible. While balancing the family / life happiness and real world use.
Having built a home from the ground up using as many of the Passive Hause standards the entire home is very tight and efficient.
The next step was to purchase electrical hardware that was efficient as it relates to the main infrastructure such as HWT, HVAC, all major appliances.
From there the next major mile stone was to integrate three different solar PV systems to address different scenarios and requirements.
The next major mile stone was to down size the eight massive 120 / 240 VAC APC Symetra UPS systems now in use. As I needed to reclaim as much space for my basement renovation.
Probably one of the saddest days of my life seeing those fridge sized UPS go!
Regardless, the biggest upgrade I made was deploying a huge cluster of SBC’s. Along with investing the right amount of finances for current hardware that could reduce the amount of servers using VM’s.
It’s honestly been a struggle to find a good balance of using VM vs bare metal hardware!
I’m very old school so physical hardware is always my slant. Just love the backup, redundancy, and resiliency.
At some point I’ll need to really commit to downsizing my network from four 42U racks to two.
Just can’t find a reason today given the years of planning and deployment.
Probably the only major change this year is deploying three massive industrial grade double conversion UPS’s. As they are cold rated in our extreme arctic weather of -40’C
One unit getting prepped about a month ago.
