Is HCI Worth It? Proxmox + Ceph in the Real World

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) sounds like the ultimate data center dream: self-healing storage, infinite scalability, and no single point of failure. But is it actually worth the complexity for a small business or a high-end home lab? In this video, we move past the marketing slides and look at the architectural reality of running Proxmox with Ceph. We’ll discuss why traditional NAS/SAN setups fail, the "hidden tax" of distributed systems, and why your network might be your biggest bottleneck. What's covered: Why traditional NAS/SAN setups hit a wall — and what HCI does differently How Ceph stitches drives across nodes into a single distributed storage pool Replication factors, failure domains, and what "degraded" actually means in practice The networking requirements you can't skip (spoiler: 1GbE will hurt you) Live demos: shared filesystems, zero-downtime migration, disk failure, node failure, and automated VM provisioning By the end you'll have seen: 📂 CephFS mounted read/write across multiple VMs at the same time 🔄 A running VM migrated between nodes with no dropped packets 💾 A disk yanked from the cluster — and the cluster heal itself automatically 💥 A full node powered off — and HA bring the VMs back on surviving nodes ⚡ 3 production-ready VMs provisioned in under 60 seconds via Terraform + cloud-init 👇 CHAPTERS / TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Introduction 01:13 The “One App, One Server” 02:13 Virtualization: Efficient… But Risky? 03:13 NAS & SAN: The Traditional Enterprise Fix 05:21 What Is HCI (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure)? 07:18 The Hidden Cost of HCI (Complexity & Networking) 09:03 When Should You Use HCI vs NAS? 11:48 Demo 1: Shared CephFS Between VMs 14:21 Demo 2: Zero-Downtime Live Migration 15:57 Demo 3: Disk Failure & Ceph Rebalancing 19:32 Demo 4: Full Node Failure & HA Restart 21:31 Demo 5: Terraform + Cloud-Init Automation 25:52 Key Takeaways (Is HCI Right for You?) 🛠️ TOOLS & TECH FEATURED: Hypervisor: Proxmox VE Storage: Ceph Automation: Terraform & Cloud-Init OS: Ubuntu Cloud Images Links: https://github.com/filip-lebiecki/pro... 🔔 SUBSCRIBE FOR PART 2: In the next video, we are diving into the most critical part of an HCI deployment: Networking. We'll cover NIC configurations, switches, bonding (LACP vs. active-backup), and how to properly separate your Ceph, VM, and management traffic using VLANs. Hit subscribe so you don't miss it! #Proxmox #Ceph #HCI #HomeLab #SysAdmin #Terraform #InfrastructureAsCode #DevOps #ServerRack #HighAvailability