Small Office Server

So i wanted to talk to some pros and hear how others might address the issue im going after.

the goal for my project is to have a server that can suffer a hardware failure and limp on so to speak so that i have time to react.

the idea so far is to use proxmox with two physical servers with identical setups to keep a windows server alive and working at all cost.

the server will be the AD and file sharing server with VPN and one other piece of software thats basically just a big shared spreadsheet. the server is currently only being used by 10 people but they have been growing quickly and things look very good for them so i want to plan forward and again have these servers always available so when something happens that i can either roll back a snapshot or the server jumps on another nod and i can come in when covenant and fix whatever is broken.

i dont really want to use a full windows environment because looking at the prices of things it seems wildly inflated and was looking at like 5k in just software licenses…

the current plan for hardware is to buy some dell servers off of ebay that are identical and then put in some a bunch of hard drives for raid 1 so again things can easily be restored. performance isnt really needed yet

so 2 dell servers running proxmox with a VM running windows server 2019 with HA enabled using Fences and hardware watchdog.
4x 1tb ssd for booting 2 per machine in raid 1
4x 6tb hdd for storage 2 per machine in raid 1

or should i add two extra machine for nas redundancy for zfs…

to be honest i dont think this plan will work very well since its my first time attempting any of this so really im looking for how an enterprise would set something like this up without spending the millions they do.

For HA… Proxmox recommends 3 hosts in a cluster minimum.

What’s your plan for shared storage? Gluster/NFS?

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Since you have to buy a windows server license anyway, what’s wrong with the full windows solution? I know this is mainly a linux forum, but…

Windows Hyper-V server is free, or with Windows Server Standard you get 1 free virtual windows guest with each physical machine.

Even if using Linux, you still need to buy the windows server license, and the CALs.

Buy two Windows server licenses from (ebay?) and then you get hyper-v, failover cluster and microsoft’s version of shared storage. then you have two additional windows server guest licenses, one for now one for future growth.

If you dont care about the the watermark… you can use win10 just fine without activating it.

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