I rebuilt my home lab into a 5-node Proxmox and Ceph cluster using a compact 10-inch mini rack. It has 17TB of all-NVMe storage and dual 10Gb LACP networking. In this video I walk through the full hardware setup, erasure coding design, Ceph networking lessons, VLAN and firewall issues, Talos Kubernetes integration, and why this Proxmox HCI build replaced VMware for my production workloads.
Read the full blog post here (and benchmarks!):
https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2026/02/i-built-a-5-node-proxmox-and-ceph-home-lab-with-17tb-and-dual-10gb-lacp/
Get a barebones Minisforum MS-01 (that I built my cluster using): https://geni.us/TtgM
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⏱ Chapters
00:00 Introduction – 5-Node Proxmox & Ceph Mini Rack
01:07 Shrinking the Lab and Leaving VMware
02:59 Why I Standardized on 5 Uniform MS-01 Nodes
04:49 NVMe Storage Layout and OSD Design
05:41 Migrating Drives to New Hardware
06:31 Bonding, LACP, VLANs, and Network Layout
07:58 Ceph Erasure Coding (3+2 Explained)
09:02 Accidentally Wiping the Wrong NVMe (OSD Recovery)
09:40 10Gb Upgrade Plan and LACP Rollout
10:26 Jumbo Frame Troubleshooting
11:18 VLAN Tagging + Firewall + LACP Issues
13:26 CephFS and Shared Storage
14:11 Running Talos Kubernetes on Proxmox
15:00 Why Five Nodes Was the Right Number
15:35 17TB in a Mini Rack
16:03 Final Thoughts and What’s Next
