I'm diving into Kubernetes for my home lab, and I have two mini PCs and a Raspberry Pi 5 to work with. I plan to run everything on Proxmox. What's the best way to set this up? Should I have one PC as a control plane and the other as a worker node? Should I include the Raspberry Pi in the cluster, or would it be better to use the other mini PC for TrueNAS or something else? For reference, I'm using K3s.
5 Answers
K3s is versatile! It allows you to run both servers and agents from the same binary. You could have HA by running them on both mini PCs and maybe throw in an agent on the Raspberry Pi for good measure.
Since you’re using K3s, I'd suggest utilizing all three devices as worker nodes. This way, you can maximize your resources while still learning!
As someone who's new to this, I think using Ubuntu on your mini PCs and setting up a proper K8s cluster with kubeadm would give you solid practice. You'll get one master and one worker easily that way, and it sets you up well for CKA and CKAD exams too!
Talos is definitely a solid choice if your hardware supports it. It simplifies a lot of the heavy lifting for Kubernetes clusters!
Yeah, Talos is great, but make sure your hardware aligns with its requirements before going all in!
With Proxmox already in play, you should create as many VMs as you need. Have one on each PC act as masters and the rest as workers. The master node can also function as a worker in K3s. Try different setups like 3 masters with 5 workers, it’s a great way to experiment! Plus, it's a nice intro to using tools like Ansible or Terraform, making scaling up or down super easy.
So I could do 1 master and 2 worker nodes on each PC? Would that work if they’re split across two devices?
Are you saying all three can work together? Like VMs on the same PC or on separate ones?