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+---
+title: "Making my Framework 13 a laptop again"
+date: 2024-06-03T13:43:05-04:00
+draft: true
+description: "Moving to a more conventional home-lab."
+---
+
+My process of converting my Framework server back into a laptop.
+
+<!--more-->
+
+My wife is in need of an upgrade from her 2015 Macbook Pro, 
+but shelling out a cool $1600 + tax for one of the shiny new *M* Macbooks 
+for the 16GB variant hardly seems an ideal proposition now that Apple 
+has relinquished consideration of its customers who 
+would prefer to amortize upgrades over the lifespan of a machine.
+It seems that leaving the Mac platform is our only consumer-friendly option 
+which avoids fighting a losing battle with Apple w.r.t. upgradability.
+
+> :wave: Framework has entered the chat.
+
+Meanwhile, Framework seems to have up-held its promise of providing a path 
+to long-term upgradability for its products. 
+The new Ryzen main-boards being compatible with my original Framework 13 
+(2021) is an example of this.
+So at this point, I'm far more inclined to commit to the Framework ecosystem 
+for my wife (and probably myself) than Apple. 
+
+Other than the initial non-trivial pain of migrating her from macOS to Windows,
+she should have a substantially better user-experience running all of her 
+Adobe crapware she wants on my old Framework.
+
+*The only problem is that my entire home-lab currently runs on my Framework.*
+
+Time to go shopping :shopping_cart:.
+
+# The Pledge
+We'll be using second-hand equipment as much as possible. Afterall, 
+the point of all this is to avoid spending the $1600 for a new laptop.
+So we should be well under that to make it worthwhile.
+
+| Part | Price (shipped) |
+| -------------- | --------------- |
+| - HP Z240 Workstation Intel Xeon 3.4GHz 16G Ram 180G SSD Nvidia K620 | $150 |
+| - Mellanox ConnectX-2 PCIe x8 10Gbe SFP+ network card | $23 |
+
+> My Framework currently has 32GB memory, and while this is much less
+I would still be okay with my current utilization for my current workload.
+
+One nice thing about this case is that it would be possible to rack-mount this
+workstation side-ways on a standard rack shelf if I decide to go that 
+route in the future.
+
+Also, I don't presently have 10Gb networking equipment at my home to actually plug
+anything into that network card, but I'm getting it now for future-proofing.
+
+IPMI would have been nice-to-have, but I decided that for this price, and the 
+bonus of that Nvidia K620 was too good to pass up! This is an 
+immediate upgrade from my current integrated Iris gpu in my Framework server.
+
+All of my home-lab VMs, and LXC containers run within Proxmox. 
+So I setup a fresh Promox here.
+
+Fortunately for me, `lspci` showed all the hardware on the first go. 
+But in order to use (pass-through) the Nvidia GPU in my guests, 
+I need to first setup the Proxmox host. 
+See my git repo for what I did to make this work.
+
+# The Turn
+
+In order to make the migration of our services *less painful*, 
+we utilize Proxmox's migration features. 
+We just need to make sure our nodes are part of a cluster.
+
+**Create the cluster on the old node.**
+Then from the new node, **join** the existing cluster.
+
+> Proxmox 8 will not let a node with existing guests join a cluster.
+
+# The Prestige
+
+Now it really is as easy as selecting a VM, or a LXC container and hitting 
+the Migrate button, and watching your VM fly away to the new node! 
+For VMs with large OS disks it takes a little longer to copy over 
+since my network is slow.
+Eventually I will use Ceph backed VM storage to make this a zero-downtime op.
+
+In a few mins, I was able to knock out all of my services. 
+Refer to my github project to see how I handled the Nvidia K60 pass-through 
+to my Nextcloud AIO instance and Plex guests.
+
+Once everything was back online, I powered down the old Framework server
+and re-installed it back into its laptop chassis, bought a W10 license, and 
+proceeded to finish the rest of the install.