Many of you are asking me what is the BOM list for a cheap but modern home lab! SDDC is as fabulous platform but it consumes large amount of memory at Day-0, it's not an issue for enterprise in regard of features but for home lab it could be seen as an expensive choice.
If you want to put your dirty hands on Kubernetes or Docker or home automation or Minecraft server or 3D Printing server... Raspberry-Pi is also an excellent building block. Personally, I use them for home automation with Domoticz and Kubernetes Clusters.
My preferred Bill-Of-Material is:
- 3 x micro SDXC card, Class 10 A1
- 3 x Raspberry-Pi 4 with 4Gb of Memory
- 5V/10A Led Power Supply
- 3 x Electric Wires to power directly RPIs soldered to GPIO:
#2 = VCC and #6 = GND
- 3 x Short Ethernet Cable + 1 Ethernet for the Uplink
- 1Gb/s Ethernet Switch with 802.1Q capabilities : TP-Link TL-SG108E
- Raspbian or Arch Linux distro
GPIO layout:
The excellent TP-LINK TL-SG108E gives us the capability to define several VLANs. I configure the last port with VLAN 2 as untagged. So, RPIs are connected to the same broadcast domain (untagged VLAN 1) on other ports but directly connected to the 8th port with VLAN 2. It's trivial, the 8th port is the uplink for the cluster.
My configuration is enhanced one with 3 VLANs, one for ADSL and one for 4G and one for normal connectivity:
With this configuration, I get the perfect balance between cost and performance avoiding crappy power supply and additionnal USB ethernet adapters.
One of use case is kubenetes, check out my repo to deploy kubernetes on rpi with a bunch of setup scripts:
I will describe in next post how to connect this tiny cluster to the cPodFactory in OVH Cloud through Wireguard. Nice teaser, is it not!
Hope you will enjoy like me.