So my build with 2 boards is done:
It works fine, though the power supply situation is kind of ridiculous:
That's 2 Supermicro PWS-351-1H power supplies shucked and stacked, with the fans moved into a 3D printed bracket. I had to shuck the power supplies to get them to fit vertically and for airflow reasons.
There's also switches to power-off each PSU, as well as remote relays to power cycle the nodes electronically.
Finally, there's a raspberry pi running
ConsolePi to control the relays and provide access to the 4 USB TTYs, though due to
an outstanding issue I mostly just use picocom for the actual serial ports.
Also yes, that is a random 5V power brick floating zip-tied to the various power cables. It's running the Pi, and I got lazy so it's connected by wires literally just soldered to the AC plug tines. I did at least heatshrink the AC connections so it's fairly finger safe.
Not pictured is I also replaced some of the power supply molex connector cables on both power supplies with SATA power cable strings scavenged from a dead power supply, so I can run SATA drives. That gives me the ability to put decent drives in the box without the concern that is molex to sata adapters.
I generally save power supplies that would otherwise be tossed, and at minimum scavenge the wires and connectors from them, because you can usually reuse those in projects if you're OK with doing some hackery. I have a number of power supplies where I've replaced unused power cable strings with more useful ones (like removing all molex connectors in favor of sata, etc...)
Anyways, all 4 nodes are now happily part of my proxmox cluster:
My only remaining issue is I need more RAM for the upper node pair, and DDR4 ram prices have just gone stupid in the last few months. I paid $300 for 128GB DDR4-2133 ECC a year ago, and now it's nearly twice that.
Anyone know a decent place to buy ECC DDR4?
www.digikey.com
www.asrockrack.com
