Raspberry Pi & Clones "microservers"

[Twice_Shy]

I'm aware the purpose of this forum has largely been previous generation enterprise gear, but if nothing else I was wondering if people could steer me to where to talk about the use of modern tiny power non-x86 single board computers.

I'm aware there are official R Pi forums - i'm actually more interested in many of the clones, since those clones exist for alot of reasons. (more power, other features, etc) Actually choosing which CLONE is like more than half of the problem.

I still plan to use heavyweight hardware at some point in the future as problems scale up but I realize two things about my current computing needs - one is that I don't need all that much YET (for things like a home NAS) and two is that overconvergence is a problem. Something that really can be single tasked may be better to just keep running on it's own rather than trying to push everything into a 12-24 core multi Xeon monster. Especially when not everything has to run 24/7.

 

[OBasel]

Just use VMs instead of physical Pi's. You don't have to deal with arm.

 

[PigLover]

There are LOTS of writeups on Pi and other SBC ARM boards. I've enjoyed the Odroid "magazine": Home Page | ODROID Magazine. Obviously a lot of pumping their products, but most of what they cover is reasonably generic to other ARM SBCs too.

As for interesting products, take a look at the Odroid-HC1 (or the 4-node Odroid-MC1 when they release it in the next week or so): ODROID-HC1 and ODROID-MC1: Affordable High-Performance And Cloud Computing At Home | ODROID Magazine. They stripped all the "extras" for a server workload (Headless - no HDMI, no WiFi, etc.). On the HC-1 they integrated a USB3-SATA bridge and mountings for a 2.5" hard disk or SSD.

When they release it the MC1 4-node package would make a fun toy for playing with Docker Swarm or Kubernetes.

Lots of other packages out there for Pi or clones. If you want mostly complete packages for Pi and several vareties of close look at Pico Cluster: PicoCluster - Desktop Micro Data Center

 

[Twice_Shy]

Virtualization is yet another ball of wax i'm not quite ready to learn on top of everything else i'm already trying to figure out.

Yes I want to use it in the future, yes I will have use for it, but if I have to learn it before I can even set up the GodServer in my house i'll be waiting another year.

 

[Twice_Shy]

There are LOTS of writeups on Pi and other SBC ARM boards.

Lots of other packages out there for Pi or clones. If you want mostly complete packages for Pi and several vareties of close look at Pico Cluster: PicoCluster - Desktop Micro Data Center

Oh yes, i'm aware of that, i'm just wondering where the big centralized 'hubs' are going to be on the big wide web, because i'm coming at this as an outsider who hasn't even touched one before. People listing their favorite related resources for R Pi and clones gives me a good starting point, plus I figured the opinions of people here might be more well informed than random google searches.

 

[OBasel]

You're still better off just virtualizing. The only cool one I've seen lately is that Marvell MacchiatoBIN. I liked the idea of that until I saw the new Atoms pricing.

Here's the issue with the ARM mini boards. You see these clusters where someone says "yo I've made a Ceph cluster with 5 nodes and RPi3's" and then you find out they're getting like 20MBps from the cluster. Or someone says "this whole site is hosted on a RPi3" and you find out it's a HTML only site with high TTFB times.

If you're into home and office automation or robotics that's a different story altogether. odroid support is until 2020. Compare that to the C2000 Atoms we saw over 4 years ago that are still running strong.

I respect @PigLover enthusiasm and I often share it.. But then after some night of troubleshooting the boards or having to do something silly to get stuff working I always come back to why not virtualize. If you need something to just play video on your TV, RPi3 is good and virtualized less good.

 

[Twice_Shy]

I'm better off doing alot of stuff, but two resources in shorter supply are time and money.

Where i'm expecting to be living for the next 2-3 years I expect to have a 25mbit connection - 3MB/sec is probably within the range of even an original Raspberry Pi to do something like usenet or torrents (or torrent like workload - BitChute is something nobody knows about that apparently uses a torrent-like protocol to share videos the way youtube does - so it's easier for me to just say "torrents") even using SAMBA to USB drives - which is about the slowest combination in the world I can think of. When that's the only thing essential to be up 24/7 and everything else can be shut off do I really need a dual socket Xeon board?

Even if I virtualize at home, I would like to build some microservers for friends who aren't as heavy duty. One guy swaps cables between four external USB drives for his HDTV which is a bit finicky about the encodes on some of his media already - i'd like to just give him an R Pi connected to all four running VLC and let him stream the same four drives to both upstairs and downstairs instead of carrying them around the house risking a drop accident. Another project I want to do involves a rural private camping location where i'd like some minor security cameras set up - solar wattage is in short supply.

I'm also "into" Atoms and potentially AMD Fusions of previous generation too - but all the sudden i'm not seeing much for sale anymore, at least not at the previously cheap prices when places like Server Supply used to have them by the boatload. So i'm trying to see if experiments with the new cheap low power boards of the day will be capable of fulfilling certain needs or not.

 

[Evan]

The problem is they are in the end not very cheap or even low power.
An intel NUC for example running a few VM’s consumes very little more power near ideal if at all and is way more powerful, I don’t really see why people love them so much accept embedded remote for IoT applications

 

[PigLover]

My enthusiasm is for both Microservers and virtualized solutions. Both have solid roles in the lab, in the home and even in fielded situations. Some of the massive micro-cluster designs are impractical - but you can learn a lot from building them. There exist services that are small and lightweight that you might not want in your Virtualization machine or cluster because they need to work independently at all times.

For example, my primary DNS for my lab sits on a Pi because I don't want to lose DNS during outage/recovery scenarios (and since I moved it there I've had none of the issues that used to plague me). Of course, the secondary DNS lives on one of the VM servers. I also run my home automation on a Odroid, but the data access is slow on the eMMC card so I am intrigued by the new HC1 - drop an older SSD in that case and it should be solid.

In general, I do think that a NUC serves these roles well. But so to the ARM SBCs. I enjoy working with both.

 

[Twice_Shy]

Well thank you for posting in my defense. So now that we've all argued the merits of our various points and agreed to individually agree and disagree on any things does anyone have really great R-Pi related websites, forums, and boards that seem to be the big "go to" places on the web? Especially if it's not the first few hits of a google search? (the best sites are not always the best promoted, or sometimes you dont even know what keywords will bring them up)

I expect to use anything and everything - R Pi's, Atoms, and conventional PC's and servers in different roles and at different times. I may find some more useful than others for some uses, which is fine, i'm just still trying to determine the best info dumps of where to help make the decisions of which to use and how to kit them out for different purposes.