Decommission midnight :(

[oceanfabreeze]

Unfortunately ESXi 6.7 is reaching EOL on 10/15/2022. This means we have to start thinking about decommissioning midnight and maybe either repurposing it for another use, or selling it off.

Midnight could stay current if we move to Proxmox or set up as a dedicated TrueNAS box. But honestly both seem to be a last resort type of idea. Midnight's current hosting as a 1U server is primarily home automation, ansible, pi-hole, and nas.

TrueNAS would be nice and would eliminate need for Synology. But we'd need to figure out how to passthrough the drives directly (new backplane? sata card?)

Maybe Game NAS? But thats a lot of power for just a bit of storage...

What makes the most sense if money isn't an object, and we need the compute resources still is as follows.

• [x] Remove Static routes from Galaxy for all server stuff and from Pi-Hole VM.
• [x] Back up data that might be on servers. (Duo, OpenVPN config, etc)

R720:

• [x] Move Data Off Hydrogen
• [x] Format Drives
• [ ] Install RAM
• [x] Flash PERC
• [x] Reinstall ESXi
• [x] Bring back up hydrogen
• [x] Bring back star
• [x] Implement separate download server for Sonarr, Radarr, Jackett so that I can set up a constant VPN.
• [x] Reinstall pi-hole, homebridge, automator, etc.
• [x] Confirm Services like OpenVPN.

R610:

• [x] Format Drives
• [x] Install H200
• [x] Install Scale

[oceanfabreeze]

Maybe convert the 610 to a TrueNAS Scale? Problem is storage with only having 2.5 drive bays...

[oceanfabreeze]

Ok, lets evaluate cost for what we're trying to do.

Single node Virt Sunset moves to Scale (New SAS Card) Replace midnight with... R620 - $312.00 R630 - $724.00

Pros - Cost benefits here are good. Plex server would be able to use Sunset for storage with everything baremetal, as well as having a separate pool for personal stuff. Cons - Data reliability? Losing performance on Plex VM's? Not able to have a dual virt environment for testing purposes. OG Midnight would be useless. Crippled by loss of drives.

Dual Virt Midnight goes Scale (New SAS) Midnight replaced with 2U R730 - $936.00 + Drives R720 - $554.00 + Drives

Pros- 2U server would be able to accept more drive storage than a 1U OG Midnight would still be in the game, could be used as a personal storage environment or as a non-prod. Expandable PCI Slots Cons- Cost is high... Data reliability again...we wouldn't have a dedicated NAS environment for storage.

Single Virt Synology takes Storage Midnight goes Scale Sunset begins to take load $1299.00

Pros- Synology NAS means data storage would be reliable and scalable. Midnight would be left intact to go non-prod or another NAS

Cons- All virt would move over to Sunset. Can it handle that load?

[oceanfabreeze]

Ok I think a good gameplan is,

Go passthrough on sunset, migrate all VM processing to sunset for now. Expand RAM. Buy another passthrough card for r610, setup baremetal scale on OG Midnight.

If cost was no object, R720 + R730 + Rackstation would be the move for production, then R610 for non-prod.

Finding cost now. Not knowing what RAID is in use for the R720 is annoying.

[oceanfabreeze]

H710p is on the R720, it can be flashed to IT mode for passthrough. This is good. I think a full rebuild is in order anyways. its best to move the PLEX data from hydrogen elsewhere.

-Move data off Hydrogen -Format Drives -Install RAM -Flash Perc card to IT mode -Reinstall ESXi -Reinstall TrueNAS -Reinstall Linux for Plex, Transmission, Etc. -Reinstall pi-hole, homebridge, automator, etc.

Install H200 Card into R610 -Format Drives -Install Scale

[oceanfabreeze]

File Backup in Progress.

TV is transferring. Should be another hour or two. Total time has been 9 hours.

[oceanfabreeze]

vpn.ovpn /etc/fstab/ /etc/pam_duo.conf/ /etc/pam.d/sshd

[oceanfabreeze]

Running into issue with drives, they're being passed through fine, but TrueNAS can't wipe. Long wipe works fine though

[oceanfabreeze]

Drive issue was with the SCSI controller. VMWare paravirtual is not the move when passing through. Use LSI.

[oceanfabreeze]

TV copy stalled, C Drive needs space available if transferring from google drive. Sits in the middle of the transfer.

[oceanfabreeze]

Star is up. Still transferring to NAS

[oceanfabreeze]

Star is up. Still transferring to NAS

[oceanfabreeze]

Ok. Drives are mapped in star. Transmission is built and up.

Added section to security hardening for follow up.

[oceanfabreeze]

All thats left is openvpn and configuring the new personal nas

[oceanfabreeze]

H200 Card Ordered

[oceanfabreeze]

SCALE is up and running on midnightv2.taffyhome.local

Realistically, the only issues we have now are ordering RAM to beef up the R720 Hardware and getting services setup OpenVPN, etc.

I'm going to go ahead and close this issue and open new issues for that work since everything seems to be working as expected.