It sounds like a bunch of little pet projects that could be run on a very small cluster. I think he just has a lot of money to burn on what is essentially a curiosity, where the scale of the system necessitates all of the complexity in it… but it doesn’t actually DO anything of importance besides run. It’s not like he had workloads and needed a setup of that scale. The setup IS the workload.
It’s like the marble machine. The build is for the build’s sake.
I've seen many parallels to this in many domains, it's a "home" version of serious commercial setups that serves to keep in touch with bleeding edge setups, to experiment with the common place Vs the off beat and so on.
If that is what this is then it doesn't need much purpose besides that alone.
Chemists, mechanical engineers, and many other similar types have been known to have "home labs" that are mini commercial grade setups similar to what they work with or routinely setup | tear down.
That's truly impressive! Even though we're a startup of about 30 people with our own server room, our setup pales in comparison to yours. I'm going to take some time to seriously study how you've done it.
I use Proxmox, but I feel ambivalent about it. If you are debating between ESXi, Proxmox, or Hyper-V, I would probably suggest Proxmox.
However, my feeling is that with the rise of containers, VMs are less relevant, and so I want a compute server OS that is more container forward (while still supporting VMs).
Ha, I came here to comment that it can’t possibly be as good as this[1] homelab that I saw on Reddit recently…then I realized it’s the same guy. Seriously incredible.
https://youtu.be/OSGLrzSuCtM
It sounds like a bunch of little pet projects that could be run on a very small cluster. I think he just has a lot of money to burn on what is essentially a curiosity, where the scale of the system necessitates all of the complexity in it… but it doesn’t actually DO anything of importance besides run. It’s not like he had workloads and needed a setup of that scale. The setup IS the workload.
It’s like the marble machine. The build is for the build’s sake.