Cheap Dedicated Cluster

[Dan]

Hi,

I want to play a little bit with micro-services and coreOS clusters, I was thinking about setting up a Avoton server from online.net for 15€ (20€ setup fee) to play around with it, it has 8 cores 8G Ram and 1T HDD, I was thinking about splitting those into 8 1 core, 1G Ram machines to create a 8 node cluster. Has anyone played with this? Is the Avoton ok in terms of performance for this kind of thing? I am open to suggestions, the only reason why i don't do this at home is because my home network connection is very crappy 1Mb upload, to provide a service is very limiting.

 

[Patrick]

I would aim for at least 2x cores per VM. The Avoton cores are much better, but still slower. If you do anything I/O heavy I would also be a bit concerned about 8 VMs on a 1TB spindle disk.

 

[Dan]

Hi Patrick, indeed I am a bit concerned about that as well, I don't have any experience with Avoton cores... This is mostly for experimenting with microservices, a nodejs cluster with a few docker containers... If things work well I will probably upgrade to a more powerful system. But it needs to at least run, that is my main concern that I may not be able to have 8 running Containers on that system... yes I would like to have multiple SSDs instead of that 1Tb disk, I could partition them to the 8 machines each with 30g, unfortunately I haven't found a cheaper solution, but I am still doing my research. I am totally open to better suggestions. Perhaps a 4 node cluster is a better approach, so that I don't have a scarcity of resources.

Here is a list of a few ideas: Setup a Apache Storm Cluster, Setup a CoreOS cluster, Experiment with Big Data processing using Hadoop and Apache Spark, etc... the list is exensive

Edit: Not VMs but containers

 

[Mike]

If you set up 8 containers then you would pretty much get native single core performance for every container @ 100%, unlike VMs where you have quite a lot of overhead in pretty much every aspect.

I even try to avoid virtual machines unless there is a requirement for it, like you would have from a security point of view.

 

[Dan]

If you set up 8 containers then you would pretty much get native single core performance for every container @ 100%, unlike VMs where you have quite a lot of overhead in pretty much every aspect.

I even try to avoid virtual machines unless there is a requirement for it, like you would have from a security point of view.

Yes you are correct, I meant 8 containers using KVM over IP not VMs. That would be the reason to get this 8 core processor vs a more powerful 4 core.

 

[Mike]

Overprovisioning shouldn't really be an issue either way. Cgroups would allow you to define the amount of cpu-shares a container would be allowed to use, and it is pretty fine grained at that. This is something the VPS hosters know all too well

 

[ruffy91]

These avaton servers come also in a variant with a 120GB SSD now. Given that they use Server grade HDD I would almost bet that theres a S3500 SSD in there.