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Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs

#31

Post by j45 »

Zanfa wrote: post #19
toprerules wrote: post #2

The one thing I don't understand about these Pi based mini-racks is why you would build a home lab that's less powerful than your client devices. My 24 U rack exists precisely because I want on demand, large amounts of compute/GPU for compiling, transcoding, encrypting, etc. and the cloud is too expensive. If you're going to make the investment into any type of home labbing, why gimp yourself with devices that can on…

I don’t think most people have the space to fit a 24U rack at home. Or tolerate the noise and power consumption of typical 19” hardware. Or cost.

24U is about half a rack? 3 feet tall or so. Now, there can be a full length rack (or cage) that has 4 posts, or there's short racks too with just the front 2 posts that can shrink the footprint a lot. This is totally reasonable to find used most places.

Noise and Power Consumption is a huge consideration. I think about it as cost of gpu or computing power per watt. While the information might not be out there, USFF devices like a one or a few Lenovo Thinkcentre m920q works pretty flawlessly with Proxmox or anything else. For a rack, they can be treated as quasi blade servers on a shelf stacked in a rack, or some cases as well. Again, up to most people

These types of USFF devices often have a desktop grade cpu in a mobile setup that is engineering/industrial grade built, and 130w power supplies, and mostly idling. There are newer generations of these types of devices from most of the manufacturers too.

Cost of electricity does add up, but more than that, keeping your wattage footprint low lets you use a more reasonable UPS for battery backup power, if there is a need, it can all stay up much, much longer.

Re: Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs

#33

Post by JKCalhoun »

bean-weevil wrote: post #11
toprerules wrote: post #2

The one thing I don't understand about these Pi based mini-racks is why you would build a home lab that's less powerful than your client devices. My 24 U rack exists precisely because I want on demand, large amounts of compute/GPU for compiling, transcoding, encrypting, etc. and the cloud is too expensive. If you're going to make the investment into any type of home labbing, why gimp yourself with devices that can on…

I feel like this concept will be useful in other situations, too, not just homelabs. I wouldn't be surprised at all to spot one of these controlling a temporary venue.

Why not add a synth as well. ;-)

Re: Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs

#34

Post by JKCalhoun »

dchuk wrote: post #22

I have zero need for a portable raspberry pi cluster but damn is this cool anyway. Also, I learned about this device from this post and immediately bought one for my existing home server remote access: https://jetkvm.com/

Yeah, I have zero need too ... until there is no power where I live. Thinking the prepper-minded might like the idea of an off-grid network.

Re: Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs

#35

Post by lotharcable2 »

toprerules wrote: post #2

The one thing I don't understand about these Pi based mini-racks is why you would build a home lab that's less powerful than your client devices. My 24 U rack exists precisely because I want on demand, large amounts of compute/GPU for compiling, transcoding, encrypting, etc. and the cloud is too expensive. If you're going to make the investment into any type of home labbing, why gimp yourself with devices that can on…

> The one thing I don't understand about these Pi based mini-racks is why you would build a home lab that's less powerful than your client devices.

It makes sense because you are unlikely to run production workloads at home.

So you don't really need a half a terabyte of RAM and a 220v power supply for the world's most expensive electric space heater.

Instead people are most often interested in developing infrastructure-as-code or testing deployment strategies or doing tests to see what happens when outages happen. Logging, metrics collecting, simulating network failure, simulating software attacks. etc.

In most of those cases having a number of smaller machines makes more sense then trying to emulate a small datacenter on a one or two big ones.

In practice I think most people end up with 2 or 3 'big machines' for times when they do need the Umph or want to have a big storage array for their "linux ISO collections". Then having a number of Pis or HP mini desktops in arrays is just for good fun.

If I want to simulate full blown workloads and benchmarking then I can just use AWS or Azure for that. A lot cheaper to lease verts for a evening or two, then buy big machines and leaving them idle 99.8% of the time.

Re: Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs

#36

Post by j45 »

toprerules wrote: post #15
andrewaylett wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I'm considering a Pi cluster is resilience and repeatability. The reason I don't have one yet is because (like you) I'm unconvinced it's the right way to get that. At least in theory, a Pi cluster has better failure modes than a single machine even if it's less powerful overall. And yes, I'm currently running on an old laptop -- but it's all a bit ad-hoc and I really want something a bit more uniform, idea…

Your house a single failure domain, you're not really going to be resilient to a lot of common failures, and most of these home labs have every device plugged into the same UPS, so there's really no difference between the power failure domain of 10 Pis and one desktop computer plugged into a UPS connected to your home router. Do yourself a favor and buy a NAS and a compatible UPS. Any modern NAS software will speak o…

Separating storage, compute, and database into dedicated appliances makes sense for home labs. Getting redundant units early is key.

A pre-built NAS (configured to raid 5 at least) is worth the cost - storage should be set-and-forget since drives will fail and hot-swapping drives and automatic rebuilds should be zero downtime to life. Commercial NAS solutions have proven backup workflows.

For compute and databases, home setups can mirror to cloud or remote locations. Proxmox makes this straightforward with its web admin - just a few clicks to spin up replicas.

Modern consumer hardware and internet are quite reliable now. Business-grade equipment performs even better.

Re: Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs

#37

Post by andrewaylett »

toprerules wrote: post #15
andrewaylett wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I'm considering a Pi cluster is resilience and repeatability. The reason I don't have one yet is because (like you) I'm unconvinced it's the right way to get that. At least in theory, a Pi cluster has better failure modes than a single machine even if it's less powerful overall. And yes, I'm currently running on an old laptop -- but it's all a bit ad-hoc and I really want something a bit more uniform, idea…

Your house a single failure domain, you're not really going to be resilient to a lot of common failures, and most of these home labs have every device plugged into the same UPS, so there's really no difference between the power failure domain of 10 Pis and one desktop computer plugged into a UPS connected to your home router. Do yourself a favor and buy a NAS and a compatible UPS. Any modern NAS software will speak o…

It's not power failure I'm worried about, it's failure of other systems. But even so, yes, it's more likely that the systems that are supposed to ensure redundancy will fail than the otherwise-non-redundant services.

For what it's worth, my house isn't a single power domain -- I'm running some of my services on an old laptop that's still got some battery. But it goes to sleep if the power goes off, and needs physical intervention to recover. Which is an excellent example of redundant systems providing multiple single points of failure and of the perils of using random left-over hardware to run stuff.

Re: Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs

#38

Post by BeefWellington »

dchuk wrote: post #22

I have zero need for a portable raspberry pi cluster but damn is this cool anyway. Also, I learned about this device from this post and immediately bought one for my existing home server remote access: https://jetkvm.com/

This is less about the Pi and more about the form factor.

Re: Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs

#39

Post by ianburrell »

walrus01 wrote: post #3

There are a few pseudo standards for "half width" 1U devices, one of the more notable vendors is mikrotik which makes devices that can be mounted as two units in 1U. https://mikrotik.com/product/rmk2_10 looks like this: https://cdn.mikrotik.com/web-assets/rb_images/2242_hi_res.pn... I wish there was some kind of firmly defined standard for exactly half of a 1U width so that different manufacturers' devices could be a…

The 10" rack is the de facto standard half-width rack. It uses the same spacing as 19" inch racks. My understanding is that two 8.75" devices fit in 19" rack with mounting bracket in the center.

Re: Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs

#40

Post by Arrowmaster »

toprerules wrote: post #12
opan wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low power device to leave on all the time, particularly for people who don't leave their clients on all the time. Like a router, but more versatile (although with a better OS on it, an actual router may do the same job).

You can buy a Synology NAS for less than the cost of this rack and it will do everything this rack can do including running containers. You can build your own NAS and run Unraid or FreeNAS or what have you for even less.

As an owner of a Synology NAS, it's woefully behind on updates. The kernel is 4.4 and the docker version is probably two years old. Yes it works good for a beginner one system does all solution but you quickly out grow it.
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