← ~/projects
$ cat ~/projects/genesiscluster.mdx

GenesisCluster

A 5-node Proxmox cluster running Ceph storage and an OpenStack control plane, with a dedicated MLAG-anchored FS pair for east-west traffic.

ProxmoxCephTerraformOpenStack
live

overview

GenesisCluster is my home-lab platform: 5 Proxmox nodes, Ceph-backed storage, and an OpenStack project for ephemeral workloads. The fabric is split-peer with MLAG LACP-proxying between a pair of PicOS switches — every node's bond0 slaves are split across both peers for resilience.

pieces

  • Compute: 5x Proxmox nodes, mixed AMD EPYC
  • Storage: Ceph (3 replicas, ~30 TB usable)
  • Networking: 2x FS S3410C-16TF running PicOS 4.7.1M-EC2, MLAG pair, split-peer cabling
  • Object storage: OpenStack Swift (also reachable via S3 API for Proxmox PBS backups)
  • Email: PMG at spam.orgvitality.com with custom LLM-tuned rules

what i learned

  • vlan-aware bridges need explicit bridge vlan add per VLAN on self/bond ports after boot
  • Swift's S3 middleware lies about region (us-east-1 works), path-style required
  • MLAG with split-peer cabling eliminates the single-switch failure mode

status: running, iterated on weekly.