Shorter article for this week as I was sick during the first part of the week and had some family events the second part. I still want to get this information out there so it’s fitting to drop it here.

While I was setting up my home lab with Proxmox, there is options to run the hosts in clusters and high availability, which everyone focuses on. However, what about going the other direction and only running a single node…

My idea behind this setup was to have the ability to spin up another node to migrate systems to for stuff like software updates or test high availability but since I’m running high end Dell servers with a lot of resources, I don’t need to run a cluster 24/7, I could just run everything on a single node to conserve power. After all this is a Home lab and not critical infrastructure.

Once I migrated all my servers over to a single node, I went to shutdown my secondary server and my cluster threw an error because it couldn’t reach Quorum. I still wanted the cluster to act normal and this node being offline is expected behavior so I did some searching. Came across a POST on the Proxmox Forum talking about changing the expected quorum numbers. All you have to do is launch the shell on the host you want to be online and enter the following command:

pvecm expect 1

Once I did this, my cluster went back to a healthy state. You can also use this for removing nodes out of a cluster down to a single node.

You can then run the status command to verify that everything is good to go.

pvecm status

Hopefully this helps you with your home lab setup. If you have other home lab tips, drop them in the comments below and share with everyone.