
Ask: Small PC to Build Test-Cluster at Home? - salzig
Hello HN.<p>I would love to build a test cluster as a playground for OpenStack, Docker, Kubernetes, you name it.<p>Anyone out there with a nice idea which hardware to use? IntelNuc? Zotac AIO? Anyone with experience out there?
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PaulHoule
I recently needed a server so I went to the local reuse center which offers
refurbished machines that are lightly used -- ex. Dell and HP machines that
were leased to dentist's offices, bank tellers, users like that. I spent $200
on a i5 Haswell machine.

Some of the machines were fairly compact desktop machines, and I liked that,
but I wound up with a large desktop machine because I'd have room for
expansion. (Maybe get a 10-series graphics card for media transcoding when
they become available again.)

Small machines have more heat and heat creates more problems. I have owned two
Mac Minis and they both have burned up hard drives at a high rate. It runs
maybe 10 to 15 centigrade hotter than a typical desktop machine. The Mac Mini
has a great design for cooling that stays clean, but I've had laptops and
other machines in my house get seriously obstructed with dust.

I would watch out for NUC, Celerons, and other low-end parts from Intel, both
in the sense of bad performance, but also because features are missing that
matter for you. (For instance, you want the best virtualization support you
can get)

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salzig
buying used machines is a good hint. Thanks!

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mikerg87
I built a six node raspberry pi cluster as a project during the holiday break.
I used the general instructions Scott Hanselman posted on his blog.

[https://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToBuildAKubernetesClusterW...](https://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToBuildAKubernetesClusterWithARMRaspberryPiThenRunNETCoreOnOpenFaas.aspx)

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salzig
already thought about this option, but in the end it isn't very flexible.

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mikerg87
If I can ask. What flexibility are you lok8ng for that the PI cluster doesn’t
have. I boot mine using PXE and it runs most everything imaginable in the
modern linux stack. Apache, docker, Kubernetes...

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salzig
Testing OpenStack would be hard :-)

