Secondary server in Switzerland

I built a secondary server at my parents’ house in Switzerland. It acts as an offsite target for TrueNAS replication and runs its own small Kubernetes cluster for workloads I want to keep running independently of the main homelab.

Hardware

The setup mirrors my main homelab — Proxmox as the hypervisor, Talos Linux for Kubernetes — but scaled down and built for a spare room rather than a rack:

• No rack-mount chassis, just a small tower case.
• A single pair of NVMe SSDs, mirrored, holding both the Proxmox boot install and the VM storage — unlike the main homelab, there’s no separate SSD pool on the TrueNAS VM, only HDDs.

Networking

Sensitive services such as the Proxmox UI and the Talos API are not exposed directly — they’re only reachable over Tailscale, which also links the server back to my main network so it can talk to the primary site.

Storage and replication

As on the primary homelab, a TrueNAS VM manages the local disks. It’s set up as a replication target: the primary TrueNAS pushes ZFS snapshots to it over the Tailscale link, so the offsite copy stays in sync without needing its own backup jobs.

Workloads

Alongside the replication target, the server runs its own small Talos Kubernetes cluster for workloads that benefit from running off-site, including monitoring — so I still have visibility into the primary site if it goes down entirely, rather than losing monitoring along with everything else.

Why this setup

Reusing the same Proxmox/Talos/TrueNAS stack as the main homelab means there’s nothing new to learn to operate this box, while physically separating it at a different site closes the single-location gap that neither democratic-csi’s local replication nor Velero could address on their own.