Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs
jeffgeerling.com
Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs
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Re: Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs
#2The 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 only run small services you could run on a single old desktop using containers?
Re: Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs
#3There 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 attached together.
Re: Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs
#4The 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 have to concur with this because the whole idea of a "pi" based homelab is just too anemic for my purposes, when you can spend as little as 200 bucks and get some older x86-64 quad core, 32GB RAM desktop PC from a Dell enterprise series of midtower desktops, which will serve as a much more powerful hypervisor. Spend just a little bit more and you're looking at Dell Precision systems with 64 or 128GB of RAM.
Re: Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs
#5The 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 would think, for fun and learning?
Re: Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs
#6The 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…
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).
Re: Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs
#7The 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 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, ideally with at least some of the affordances I'm enjoying when deploying stuff professionally.
Re: Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs
#8The 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…
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).
I feel like an m-series mac mini would be a really good fit for that - plenty of juice for when you need it, but very low idle power draw. The small size (especially for the m4 version) is an added benefit.
Re: Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs
#9The 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…
What if I told you that a modern MBP has more IOPs (and faster individual cores) than servers that many large companies use?
Re: Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs
#10The 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 would think, for fun and learning?
I suppose. You could also use a single desktop and set up your own virtual network bridge, attach multiple veths connected to separate network namespaces, or attach tun devices with virtual machine images running raspberry pi os under qemu, set up DHCP for their virtual mac addresses, set up routing tables, and save yourself some money and time inserting raspberry pis into a pre-built rack. Learning how to set up a rack of servers can be done for free if you already have a Linux machine.