New server in. Old server out.
Tech without the technobabble.
Last week I built a three-node Proxmox cluster. This week I decided that clearly three servers were not enough, added a much more capable machine, moved the useful bits across and retired one of the older boxes.
There is also a rare opportunity to tell the Home Assistant team what makes you—or the less technical people sharing your home—say, “What the heck?!”
Add a node without losing the machines already on it
A Proxmox node needs to be clean before it joins an existing cluster. My new server was not clean: it already held the Kea/Stork DHCP system and another guest. The practical answer was to inventory everything, make proper backups, remove the guests, join the node and restore them afterwards.
The restored guests needed new VM numbers because those IDs were already in use elsewhere in the cluster. Proxmox handled that neatly by offering the next available IDs. I then migrated Pi-hole onto the new server and removed the old mini host from the cluster.
This remains a sensible home-lab cluster rather than an expensive high-availability setup. The disks are local, so migrations take a few minutes—but that is perfectly acceptable when the goal is easier maintenance, not running a bank.
What makes your household say “What the heck?!”
For the whole of November, Home Assistant is asking people to share the parts of the system that feel hard, confusing or simply annoying. This year’s event particularly wants to hear from beginners, non-technical users and people who live with a smart home somebody else built.
That last group matters. A dashboard can seem perfectly obvious to the person who made it while everybody else is quietly wondering why the kitchen lights have developed opinions.
The advice is simple: search before posting, keep each problem to one topic, describe what happened rather than designing the solution, and be kind. The feedback category is open throughout November.
A backup is only useful if you can find and restore it
Before removing guests from a Proxmox node, check where the backup files actually live and how you will make them visible again after the node joins the cluster. Write down the guest IDs too—duplicate IDs are easy to resolve, but much easier when they are not a surprise.
See you next week,
Martyn