Two TrueNAS servers. Same rack. One's on CORE, one's on SCALE.
If someone asked me why, the honest answer isn't a design decision. It's a series of arrivals — one workload trigger at a time, each landing on whichever server had the shape to accept it, until the current arrangement crystallised into "how it is." Years of small choices, no whiteboard, no reorg since.
The segmentation piece covered a design I made deliberately. The OPNsense piece covered a build I saw through carefully. This piece covers a deployment that neither framing fits — because I didn't design it clean, and I didn't build it as one project. I ended up with it.
That distinction matters, because "designed," "built," and "ended up with" are three different things at homelab scale. Public writeups tend to blur them into one narrative — here's what I set out to do, here's what I ended up with, and the middle is a series of clean decisions that led logically from one to the other. Reality is messier. Workloads pivot. Constraints move. Servers get added because the workload you were adopting required them. Pools get shaped by an HBA ceiling you don't have anymore. Personal storage lands wherever there's room. And the rack ends up looking like the shape of a decade, not the shape of a design.
