Hi,
I thought I'd post my latest project. I use a bunch of Raspberry Pi compute modules as servers and decided to build myself a custom blade server to host them. This is replacing a bunch of old Intel rack mount servers on my home network - it's a lot less power hungry! It's been through a few iterations and is now working really well. This is the server:
It's a 2U rack mountable unit, in an off-the-shelf ABS case with some custom 3D printed parts. The server takes up to 10 of these blades:
It's got gigabit Ethernet, USB-A and HDMI on the front and an NVMe SSD slot on the board, along with an SD card slot and a battery backed real time clock. There's a little OLED on the front displaying information about the blade, including the name and IP address to make it easy to identify for maintenance. There's also an RP2040 on it for management.
The blades plug in to a custom backplane which provides power and centralised management. There's an LCD front panel providing basic tools for powering on and off blades and status information, and another compute module which acts as a management web server. It can be used to upload flash images to the blades via the backplane, and provides serial console access to the blades through the web interface.
I've been using this for a while now and was wondering if other folks out there are interested in it? It would be quite quick and easy for me to turn this into a product for sale if there was a market out there for it.
Please let me know any comments or suggestions you have, any feedback is appreciated!
Alastair
This is truly awesome. I love seeing the work done in this space. An on premise baby cluster all in 2U is amazing. I wonder what the commercial opportunities are for something like this…pre-installed with K8s, fully networked via the backplane, storage-less or storage-full, etc. A single 10Gb link out for public access and / or cluster access to external storage. Speed up the cluster? Just decommission a node, slide the latest compute module in and provision it from the management control plane. I think I’d buy something like that.
Thanks! I'd really like to do a version of this with an on-board switch. I wanted to get something up and running so I built this with Ethernet sockets on each blade as that was the simplest way to get going. It works really well as a server like this, but it'd be really cool to have just a single 10GbE link to the outside world.
I looked into it and it's definitely do-able, but is a definite version 2 project! It's surprisingly difficult to find an Ethernet switch IC with 11+ GbE ports (10 blades plus one management) and 10GbE uplink that's easily available to regular hardware tinkerers like me. The VSC7444 is the one I found but it's a £120 BGA so would be an expensive project if I break a few :-) Most fast switch ICs seem to have no public info and not be available via normal distributors in small quantities. Broadcom have a couple, but again quite expensive and limited public information.
I reckon if I'm able to sell a few of the current units then I'll have a go at the on-board switch one at some point. I reckon that although it would add to the cost of the server unit it'd probably be the same price overall by reducing the number of external switch ports you need.
I'm not familiar with switch ICs, do the ones you've been looking at provide any kind of VLAN functionality, or are they just "dumb" everything-on-the-same-Ethernet segment type things?
I suspect it would be too slow, but would software switching on the management board be an option (e.g. a 1GbE link between it and each node with any arbitrary bridging setup you can imagine between them on the management board end).