Site Roles & Systems
What Site A and Site B are responsible for, how physical hosts and service workloads support those outcomes, and where workloads should be placed.
Site roles describe outcomes rather than just inventory. Site A is the management and durable-services anchor; Site B is the distributed storage and compute pool. Edge hosts protect routing capacity, storage hosts protect data paths, and service placement follows those boundaries.
Responsibility Map
| Capability | Primary home | Secondary or recovery path | Why it lives there |
|---|---|---|---|
| Routing and stateful policy | Local OPNsense at each site | Manual rollback equipment; no automatic HA migration | WAN NICs and site gateways are physically local |
| Internal DNS authority | sa-dns-01 at Site A | sa-dns-02, sb-dns-01, sb-dns-02 | One writable source with four resolvers and AXFR replicas |
| UniFi control | sa-uos-01 at Site A | Controller-down forwarding continues | Site A owns the active controller; Site B adopts over L3 later |
| Runtime secrets | One OpenBao instance per site | Break-glass fallback plus planned cross-site transit unseal | Avoids stretched Raft and preserves site-local recovery |
| Durable local storage | ZFS at Site A; Ceph at Site B | PBS copies at both sites | Matches each site's hardware shape |
| Platform compute | Small Site A pool; worker-heavy Site B pool | Workloads recover from backups and source | Keeps management workloads away from Ceph/Kubernetes pressure |
| Monitoring and core services | Site A | Restore or redeploy at Site B as planned | Site A is the management anchor |
Site A: Management and Durable Services
Site A ·10.10.0.0/16
Site A supplies the services needed to operate the homelab: the primary DNS source, UniFi control, OpenBao, ZFS-backed infrastructure, PBS-A, monitoring, and a smaller compute pool. The target network is a three-switch Layer 2 RSTP fabric behind sa-fw-01.
Physical Systems
| System | Hardware | Role in the site | Primary management address |
|---|---|---|---|
sa-edge-01 | Supermicro SYS-E200-8D | Pinned sa-fw-01, sa-uos-01, sa-bao-01; light edge utilities | 10.10.20.10 |
sa-cmp-01 | ThinkPad P51 | CI, development, light VM and Kubernetes worker capacity | 10.10.20.11 |
sa-cmp-02 | ThinkPad P52 | GPU, AI, media, build, and light VM/Kubernetes work | 10.10.20.12 |
sa-stor-01 | Supermicro 5049A-T | ZFS, PBS-A, primary DNS, monitoring, databases, core VMs | 10.10.20.20 |
sa-sw-01/02/03 | 3× UniFi Switch Pro XG 10 PoE | L2 RSTP fabric; router, host, storage, and access attachments | 10.10.10.2–4 |
sa-ap-01 | UniFi U7 Pro XGS | Trusted, IoT, and guest Wi-Fi through sa-sw-03 | 10.10.10.6 |
Service Systems
| Service | Placement | Addressing | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
sa-fw-01 | Pinned VM on sa-edge-01 | Routed Site A .1 addresses; 10.255.0.1 | WAN, NAT, gateways, DHCP, WireGuard, DMZ, policy |
sa-uos-01 | VM on sa-edge-01 | 10.10.10.40 | UniFi switch and AP control; later Site B L3 adoption |
sa-bao-01 | VM on sa-edge-01 | 10.10.30.40 | Site A runtime secrets |
sa-dns-01 | VM/LXC on sa-stor-01 | 10.10.30.10 | Writable Technitium primary for core.aorxi.io |
sa-dns-02 | VM/LXC on sa-cmp-01 or sa-cmp-02 | 10.10.30.11 | Site A DNS replica and local failover |
| PBS-A | VM/container on sa-stor-01 | 10.10.30.20; backup 10.10.90.40 | Local backups and planned cross-site replication |
Site A Lifecycle State
The Gateway Max and XG6 are the current bootstrap island. They are not additional target routing or switching tiers. The three XG10 switches are commissioned only on the isolated OPNsense-backed target plane, and the ONT moves after wired, wireless, and policy gates pass.
Site B: Distributed Storage and Compute
Site B ·10.20.0.0/16
Site B supplies the scale-out side of the private cloud: five Ceph-capable compute nodes, the larger Kubernetes/OpenShift pool, PBS-B, local DNS replicas, and an independent OpenBao instance. sb-sw-01 remains the Layer 2 core; the USG Pro user branch remains downstream of OPNsense.
Physical Systems
| System | Hardware | Role in the site | Primary management address |
|---|---|---|---|
sb-edge-01 | Supermicro SYS-E200-8D | Pinned sb-fw-01, sb-bao-01, light edge utilities | 10.20.20.10 |
sb-cmp-01 | SYS-5019D-4C-FN8TP | sb-pve creation node, Ceph MON/MGR, K8s control-plane | 10.20.20.20 |
sb-cmp-02 | SYS-5019D-4C-FN8TP | Ceph MON/MGR, K8s control-plane | 10.20.20.21 |
sb-cmp-03 | SYS-5018D-FN4T | Ceph OSD, K8s worker, distributed compute | 10.20.20.30 |
sb-cmp-04 | SYS-5018D-FN4T | Ceph OSD, K8s worker | 10.20.20.31 |
sb-cmp-05 | SYS-5018D-FN4T | Ceph OSD, K8s worker | 10.20.20.32 |
sb-sw-01 | Netgear XS748T | 10 Gb L2 infrastructure, Ceph, and compute core | 10.20.10.2 |
sb-sw-02 | UniFi USW 24 PoE | Access, IPMI, AP, PoE, and client switching | 10.20.10.3 |
Service and Platform Systems
| Service | Placement | Addressing | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
sb-fw-01 | Pinned VM on sb-edge-01 | Routed Site B .1 addresses; 10.255.0.2 | WAN, NAT, gateways, WireGuard, DMZ, policy |
| Site B Ceph | sb-cmp-01 through sb-cmp-05 | Public 10.20.60.0/24; cluster 10.20.65.0/24 | Site-local distributed storage, replication size 3 |
sb-bao-01 | VM on sb-edge-01 | 10.20.30.40 | Site B runtime secrets and planned transit-unseal peer |
sb-dns-01 | VM/LXC on sb-cmp-01 | 10.20.30.10 | Site B DNS replica |
sb-dns-02 | VM/LXC on sb-cmp-02 | 10.20.30.11 | Site B DNS replica |
| PBS-B | Site B Proxmox VM | 10.20.30.20; backup 10.20.90.40 | Site B backups and cross-site DR target |
| USG Pro | Downstream of sb-fw-01 | WAN 10.20.253.2; management 10.20.10.4 | Retained user/Wi-Fi compatibility branch |
Site B Is Planned and Parked
Site B architecture is documented so addressing, hardware allocation, and cross-site dependencies remain coherent, but the Site B rollout has not started. Services that depend on Site B—WireGuard, cross-site PBS replication, transit unseal, and Site B DNS replicas—are design state rather than deployed reality.
Workload Placement Rules
Protect the Edge Hosts
Firewall VMs Stay Pinned
sa-fw-01 stays on sa-edge-01; sb-fw-01 stays on sb-edge-01. Neither firewall VM participates in Proxmox HA migration.
The E200 nodes may run OPNsense, OpenBao, the UniFi controller, DNS helpers, a small reverse proxy, or monitoring agents. Heavy databases, Ceph OSDs, storage-heavy VMs, and heavy Kubernetes workers do not belong there because they can starve the site router.
Keep Storage Traffic on Storage Paths
Site A storage consumers attach directly to VLAN 60 and sa-stor-01. Site B Ceph uses separate VLAN 60 public and VLAN 65 cluster networks. None of these storage networks has a gateway, and no traffic routes between VLANs 60 and 65.
Give Control Planes Independent Failure Placement
DNS replicas split across hosts. Site B Ceph MON/MGR and Kubernetes control-plane roles use sb-cmp-01 and sb-cmp-02; workers use sb-cmp-03/04/05. Site A cluster formation waits until all four nodes have final VLAN 20 management addresses and valid /etc/hosts entries.
Use the full system map to inspect every system and IP, or continue to physical & logical topology to follow network paths and failures.
The Two-Site Model
Why AORXI uses two independent site-local failure domains, what the sites share, and why Site A and Site B intentionally use different network and storage designs.
Physical & Logical Topology
How WAN, Layer 2 transport, routed VLANs, storage planes, service traffic, and failure boundaries fit together across Site A and Site B.