3 ms·

Some Intel NUC's look to be 38mm tall, short enough to possibly fit in a 1U rack at 44.5mm. There's also the Minisforum for Ryzen's or Odroids H2+.

postpawl 5y ago
The NUCs and Minisforum would be fewer cores for price (with 4 cores per $400-500), but I'm sure they'd be way faster. Excellent idea.
- elcritch 5y ago
  They're pretty fast, with a few hexacores. Quite a bit more than a RPi4 but still under 25W each. There's a few NUCs for $350 or so.
  - vetinari 5y ago
    They have a small fan, which is quite annoying when the NUC is under load. Not a problem in colo, but annoying in homelab. Not a deal breaker, but something to think about.
jpdb 5y ago
NUCs are a bit difficult to source right now, but I'd be super interested in coloing ~4 of them + a switch + a nas of some sort in a 1/2U chassis running k3s.
vetinari 5y ago
Yes, the slim -DNKE NUCs do fit into 1U, three of them next to each other; you can find mounts like these to do that: https://www.myelectronics.nl/us/nuc-minipc-19-rackmount-kit-1-3-nucs.html https://www.myelectronics.nl/us/nuc-minipc-19-rackmount-kit-.... If you have 3U to work with, you can fit 12 of them. For the thick (-DNHE) NUCs, you either need 1.5U for three of them, or you can fit 8 of them into 3U.
- postpawl 5y ago
  Colocation providers seem to charge an additional $5-10 per Ethernet port. That’s part of why I ended up cramming all the Pis into the 1U and using the network switch. There’s a similar rack mount for Pis, but I would have needed to pay for the additional Ethernet ports monthly.
  - elcritch 5y ago
    That makes sense. BTW, fun project write up! I'm torn between doing the colo or just upgrading to 1G fiber at home. To run 3-4 NUC's I'd use 2-3 120V-to-14V DC module's in parallel. Then if one power supply failed, you'd have redundancy! They run off 12V-19V nicely and you can source switches that run off 12V-19V as well. It's even possible to put in a LiFePO4 battery for backup. I'll probably do that at home to skip the UPS. In, all you can have a decent server cluster with top of the line redundancy. Well, stick a pi4 in for remote management. I use Nerves for my flashing remote devices then using docker or containers to run the software. One project I wanted to toy around with (and it'd work with Pi4's) would be a secure cluster setup without k8s. There's apparently support in KVM to run a VM with hot-swap if you can setup a shared storage. It seems KVM supports Gluster (or Cepher?) for shared storage. I'm a bit surprised it's not already "a thing" for small businesses.
    - vetinari 5y ago
      If you want to play with live migrations, try a cluster running Proxmox. It does support both Gluster and Ceph, and for smaller clusters ZFS (yes, you can live migrate VMs with local disks backed by ZFS, once you set up a replication). Also note that distributed filesystems (Ceph at least) want to own entire block device; thus you need something else to boot & run the system from (which is going to be a problem for slim NUCs above, that have only a single M.2 slot). Ceph and Gluster are not a thing for small businesses, because for them to be practical, they want cluster sizes that are beyond needs of small businesses. It is a gun too big for them.
      - elcritch 5y ago

postpawl 5y ago

The NUCs and Minisforum would be fewer cores for price (with 4 cores per $400-500), but I'm sure they'd be way faster. Excellent idea.

elcritch 5y ago
They're pretty fast, with a few hexacores. Quite a bit more than a RPi4 but still under 25W each. There's a few NUCs for $350 or so.
- vetinari 5y ago
  They have a small fan, which is quite annoying when the NUC is under load. Not a problem in colo, but annoying in homelab. Not a deal breaker, but something to think about.

jpdb 5y ago

NUCs are a bit difficult to source right now, but I'd be super interested in coloing ~4 of them + a switch + a nas of some sort in a 1/2U chassis running k3s.

vetinari 5y ago

Yes, the slim -DNKE NUCs do fit into 1U, three of them next to each other; you can find mounts like these to do that: https://www.myelectronics.nl/us/nuc-minipc-19-rackmount-kit-1-3-nucs.html https://www.myelectronics.nl/us/nuc-minipc-19-rackmount-kit-.... If you have 3U to work with, you can fit 12 of them. For the thick (-DNHE) NUCs, you either need 1.5U for three of them, or you can fit 8 of them into 3U.

postpawl 5y ago
Colocation providers seem to charge an additional $5-10 per Ethernet port. That’s part of why I ended up cramming all the Pis into the 1U and using the network switch. There’s a similar rack mount for Pis, but I would have needed to pay for the additional Ethernet ports monthly.
- elcritch 5y ago
  That makes sense. BTW, fun project write up! I'm torn between doing the colo or just upgrading to 1G fiber at home. To run 3-4 NUC's I'd use 2-3 120V-to-14V DC module's in parallel. Then if one power supply failed, you'd have redundancy! They run off 12V-19V nicely and you can source switches that run off 12V-19V as well. It's even possible to put in a LiFePO4 battery for backup. I'll probably do that at home to skip the UPS. In, all you can have a decent server cluster with top of the line redundancy. Well, stick a pi4 in for remote management. I use Nerves for my flashing remote devices then using docker or containers to run the software. One project I wanted to toy around with (and it'd work with Pi4's) would be a secure cluster setup without k8s. There's apparently support in KVM to run a VM with hot-swap if you can setup a shared storage. It seems KVM supports Gluster (or Cepher?) for shared storage. I'm a bit surprised it's not already "a thing" for small businesses.
  - vetinari 5y ago
    If you want to play with live migrations, try a cluster running Proxmox. It does support both Gluster and Ceph, and for smaller clusters ZFS (yes, you can live migrate VMs with local disks backed by ZFS, once you set up a replication). Also note that distributed filesystems (Ceph at least) want to own entire block device; thus you need something else to boot & run the system from (which is going to be a problem for slim NUCs above, that have only a single M.2 slot). Ceph and Gluster are not a thing for small businesses, because for them to be practical, they want cluster sizes that are beyond needs of small businesses. It is a gun too big for them.
    - elcritch 5y ago