u/Bartgames03

I am looking at possible ways to build my homelab (when time and money allow for it). The pc that I was planning on using as a hypervisor has a spare pcie3.0 x16 slot. Since I want my vms living on a separate drive(s) as the OS, and the pc doesn't have supported hardware to passthrough HDD's to a truenas VM and has only one m.2 slot, that is out of the question. I still would like to use that slot. I was planning on using that slot for a GPU at first, but i won't need that much GPU horsepower, so I can just use the iGPU. So I thought I could use a riser to host a cache drive(s) for proxmox and use HDD's for the actual storage of the VM's. My questions are: would this actually work? And how well would this work? And if it works, how big should I make the cache drive(s)?

I have the standard import bus connected to a barrel. It has had time to fully ramp up and has 4 acceleration cards in it, but it is running too slow it seems. I dunno if something changed over time, but it seemed like it should be running faster than it is now.

I have an ore processing cube with Compact Machines. Here the ores go in and get processed into raw ore. This ore then goes to, for now, a barrel with an import bus attached. At first I wanted it to push into an interface, but for some reason it doesn't, when it does to the barrel. It does pull from the interface, but not push.

I already have a mini pc with an i7 9700(non k). If I upgrade the ram, storage and networking, I have a very capable machine for virtualizing. I was planning on running a vm for my minecraft server, maybe kali for IT security stuff (and maybe some other security VM's/applications) and maybe a windows server for AD and other services. The reason I wanted a nuc cluster was to mess with HA, but I just realized that I dont really have a usecase for HA. I can just spin up VM's on the mini pc and install something like kubernetes if I wanted to spin up containers. I assume they won't need much hardware, the VM's I mean, so the cluster would be unnecessary and would just waste electricity and money.

Any reason to justify a NUC cluster? Any good reason I should still go for it whenever I build my homelab?

The minipc currently runs ESXi8u1, but will switch to proxmox when I build my homelab to take advantage of proxmox's backup software. The cluster would also run Proxmox, for the same reason, and also for the better support for consumer hardware.

EDIT: Was planning to start with a cluster of 4 ASUS NUC 15 PRO 100U's

CORRECTION: Misread the specsheet. It has 4 SATA 3.0 connectors. I read it as SATA-300.

Just doing some research and asking around. I have a Shuttle SH370R8. I currently have ESXI running on it, but when I'll be making my homelab (whenever the time comes, for now I'm only dreaming), I'll be switching to Proxmox. I can't really decide if I should go with hw raid to make one big pool or use an HBA/onboard SATA-600 and use something like ZFS. I would like to use 4 sata ssd's.

My question, in short, is: Which one would offer me the best performance? Which is the most efficient, resource wise, in offering the highest performance with the highest compatibility (with the OS)? The drives will be used as a datastore for VM's.

The problem with the raid option, is that I don't know if the bios on the shuttle supports it (If I have read it correctly on how to set it up). I have never used a raid card in my life so I wouldn't know how things work and if things will work. I'd rather not waste a lot of money on a card which won't work with the shuttle.

EDIT: The motherboard itself supports "Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST)", so I could also use that instead of a dedicated RAID card if it performs well enough.