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Raspberry Pi Server Mark III

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Re: Raspberry Pi Server Mark III

#111

Post by rixrax »

exabrial wrote: post #79

That is a damn good looking 3d print wow. My only beef with RPIs as servers is disk I/O is terrible. If that's been solved, I'd love to know! If the SOC has PCI-E lanes that were accessable externally I feel like the server side would really take off

I think recent firmwares would allow Sd-card-less pxe boot. I was wondering the other day if you could then run the whole system from RAM disk only and/or maybe mount volumes via iSCSI from SAN (keeping in mind limitations of RPi 1Gb nic).

Edit: someone has done this already. Of course! :) ( https://tech.xlab.si/blog/pxe-boot-raspberry-pi-iscsi/ )

Re: Raspberry Pi Server Mark III

#112

Post by kyran_adept »

pjc50 wrote: post #85
ak39 wrote: post #66

This is so exciting. Is this type of "movement" (trend) likely to see data centers coming back on premises for enteprise markets? (ie. back from cloud)

Cloud vs. datacenter is entirely about administration, rather than hardware.

I would say it's more about elasticity and the ability to scale horizontally if you take the minimum amount of precautions when designing your app.

Re: Raspberry Pi Server Mark III

#113

Post by nixgeek »

Galanwe wrote: post #25
contingencies wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purpose: Learn linux clustering/diskless nodes. Advantages: Cheaper than conventional servers, limited physical form factor suitable for constrained environments such as apartments, luggage, etc. Low power consumption, suitable for mobile/off-grid/renewable. Recommended software: https://clusterlabs.org https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/nfs/nfsro... https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Diskless_nodes Commerc…

> Learn linux clustering/diskless nodes. Honestly, could be as valid with a setup that just involves running a bunch of VMs. > Low power consumption Yeah, well, a typical laptop should draw around 50W, which is what, like 0.05$ a day? > Commercial advantage: Run highly cost and power efficient data centers Hu, no, in terms of power efficiency per unit of work, you will not beat specialized hardware. > Infrastructure…

> Yeah, well, a typical laptop should draw around 50W, which is what, like 0.05$ a day?

At least where I live that would be 1.2kWh and about 13 cents per day, around $4 per month, or around $50 per year if running 24x7.

Pacific Northwest has I believe some of the cheaper power in the U.S. at 10-11 cents per kilowatt hour.

Re: Raspberry Pi Server Mark III

#114

Post by sirn »

kingosticks wrote: post #72
ekianjo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nextcloud would be much cheaper to run on a x86 board.

Can you expand on why?

My guess would be Nextcloud put a lot of load on both CPU and disk (for thumbnail generation, file encryption, etc.) making Raspberry Pi which lack performance in both front not very suitable for the task.

I tried running Nextcloud on Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB) a while ago, and hitting performance issue on SD card very fast (initial DB import take very long). I tried to solve this by moving all Nextcloud data into iSCSI disk but RAM & CPU became a problem once I started adding more files. After a week or so, I tore everything down and went back to a VPS instance.

It might works better with Raspberry Pi cluster on Kubernetes, though. (This very Raspberry Pi is now happily running as a DVB streaming server.)

Re: Raspberry Pi Server Mark III

#115

Post by djsumdog »

amelius wrote: post #51

If only there was a standard way of communicating the cost-effectiveness of these things ...

PoE Ethernet would mean just one cable to each device.

Hmm ... seems like you can also network boot them over DHCP/TFTP:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

Re: Raspberry Pi Server Mark III

#116

Post by kingosticks »

sirn wrote: post #114
kingosticks wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on why?

My guess would be Nextcloud put a lot of load on both CPU and disk (for thumbnail generation, file encryption, etc.) making Raspberry Pi which lack performance in both front not very suitable for the task. I tried running Nextcloud on Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB) a while ago, and hitting performance issue on SD card very fast (initial DB import take very long). I tried to solve this by moving all Nextcloud data into iSCSI di…

Thanks. I keep meaning to try it out but booting from an SSD instead. I was hoping anything intensive (e.g. thumbnail generation) would be a one-time thing so not noticeable in daily usage. Perhaps I will re-think, I have a ThinkCentre M75q I could use but that seems overkill.

Re: Raspberry Pi Server Mark III

#117

Post by 0x426577617265 »

rixrax wrote: post #111
exabrial wrote: post #79

That is a damn good looking 3d print wow. My only beef with RPIs as servers is disk I/O is terrible. If that's been solved, I'd love to know! If the SOC has PCI-E lanes that were accessable externally I feel like the server side would really take off

I think recent firmwares would allow Sd-card-less pxe boot. I was wondering the other day if you could then run the whole system from RAM disk only and/or maybe mount volumes via iSCSI from SAN (keeping in mind limitations of RPi 1Gb nic). Edit: someone has done this already. Of course! :) ( https://tech.xlab.si/blog/pxe-boot-raspberry-pi-iscsi/ )

Could also use the sd card to boot only, then pass everything to a USB3 SSD.

Re: Raspberry Pi Server Mark III

#118

Post by luzer7 »

z3t4 wrote: post #23
contingencies wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purpose: Learn linux clustering/diskless nodes. Advantages: Cheaper than conventional servers, limited physical form factor suitable for constrained environments such as apartments, luggage, etc. Low power consumption, suitable for mobile/off-grid/renewable. Recommended software: https://clusterlabs.org https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/nfs/nfsro... https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Diskless_nodes Commerc…

You could rent a couple of 1USD/month VPS, or if really on a budget rent a bunch of containers with ipv6 for just a few cents

Any links to an ok $1 VPS that would work? I tried a few a while back and always have an issue with RAM.

What's the best way to go about clusters since I think you need 1gb RAM per node and lowest I've seen is $5.

Thanks

Re: Raspberry Pi Server Mark III

#119

Post by pat2man »

metalliqaz wrote: post #109
3327 wrote: post #105

What is a use case for this if any?

There isn't one. For actually delivering an application, a traditional server is better in every way, unless your application is so small that you are wasting your hardware and get killed on power costs. It's more or less the same as the people in /r/homelab who have full server racks in their basements but never do anything with most of their eBay servers other than install CentOS on them. At least those can serve m…

I mean there are probably a few super edge cases for something like this. A digital art display, or theater production for instance. Something you can custom 3d print yourself is just about perfect for that.

Re: Raspberry Pi Server Mark III

#120

Post by z3t4 »

bstar77 wrote: post #89
z3t4 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could rent a couple of 1USD/month VPS, or if really on a budget rent a bunch of containers with ipv6 for just a few cents

One issue I have with going the VPS route is that what I'm charged is often not what I'm expecting. I will use estimation calculators and figure my bill will be $25/month (which I get for a couple months) and then suddenly get a $120 bill. This has happened more than once and has had me loose all confidence in these services for hobby projects. I'd rather just buy a Pi cluster at this point.

Your agreement was $25/month, so if they start to charge you $120 you pay them $25 and then cancel the service. This is very annoying but do happen dealing with unscrupulous businesses. Although if they have 500% margin eg. you pay $5 for something you can get for $1 elsewhere they will care more about keeping you as a customer. Compared to for example a cloud bill, renting a VPS is both cheaper and more predictive. If you are however paying $25/month you should start looking at dedicated servers, where all resources are preserved for you.
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