Two Sites, One Cluster: My Hetzner Proxmox VE Setup - A low-cost two-node cluster with VXLAN, ZFS replication and an external quorum vote

Table of Contents Table of Contents The Big Picture What this is, and what it is not The Hardware The vSwitch Fabric Solving the Two-Node Quorum Problem The Overlay Network: VXLAN Firewalling: One OPNsense per Node Replication and Migration Failure Modes Lessons Learned Conclusion References I have written a fair amount on this blog about FreeBSD, jails, and running my own AS. What I have never written about is the layer underneath a good chunk of it: a small Proxmox VE cluster built from two cheap Hetzner dedicated servers, sitting in two different datacentres, glued together over Hetzner’s vSwitch fabric into a single quorate cluster. This article is the tour. The guiding principle is the same one I apply everywhere: spend as little money as possible, understand every moving part, and avoid anything I cannot debug at 3 a.m. There is no enterprise SAN here, no fibre channel, no four-figure switch. Just two commodity boxes, a handful of VLANs, and Proxmox doing what it does well. The…