If you're going to use VMs or containers when you definitely want more RAM. The CPU looks fine though for that use. If you're using it as a media server you'll get through 500GB in no time at all, so make sure you've got space for more drives.
I've had success using FreeNAS (now TrueNAS) for this sort of thing in the past. That's got the Jails feature for virtualising apps. I haven't used Unraid or proxmox so can't compare it to those.
Thank you! Yes, I'd really like to do this in a future version, I've mentioned a bit more detail on some other replies. It'll be quite an expensive thing to develop which is why I went with this for now. It'd certainly make for a much tidier setup.
If you were to lose the front panel sockets and do the switching on board then it's possible to pack quite a few into a 19" width. There's also space to fit 2 compute modules per blade, so in theory it could get quite dense. Cooling would definitely be the issue. I suspect with powerful enough case fans it should be workable.
Totally understand what you mean. My background is as a freelance programmer and I have my own business doing this. I've never commercialised any hardware (though I've built plenty of stuff for my own use) so it's a bit of a leap into the dark. I don't imagine there'd be huge volumes so not expecting to make my fortune from it. I built this for my own use and now it's done I'd be happy to make it available as a small run thing.
I'll do a blog post with more design details soon and open up the design and firmware stuff on a public repo. It's all done with open source tools anyway, all the design is in KiCad as I don't do enough hardware work to justify the cost of something like Altium!
Yeah, at the very least I'll hand-build a few units with the spares I've got here and make those available. If there's enough demand I'll potentially do a full production run. I'll open source the designs too so folks can have a proper poke about in it :-)
Thank you! Yes, you're correct on your guesses. There's blade to backplane/management server comms, but no direct blade to blade comms. As I've mentioned on a couple of other replies, it's definitely possible to do a version of this where the Ethernet comes from the blade to the backplane over the PCI-e connector and into a switch on the backplane, so that you'd have all the switching done on-board and a single uplink port. It's a much more complicated project to do though so not something I've tackled yet.
The blade uses PCI-e card edge connectors as they're cheap, and I route UART0 (GPIO 14/15) and the USB from the compute onto this. There's a USB switch IC on the blade which can route the CM's USB output to either the host port on the front of the blade or through the backplane. The UARTs and USB are connected through switches on the backplane into the management module. The blades also have RP2040s on them which are connected to various pins on the compute modules, and the management module can talk to these using I2C. It's able to use this for doing stuff like restarting the CM into provisioning mode, and for reporting status information. The RP2040 is connected via I2C to both the compute module on the blade and the backplane's management module, so can be used for exchanging status information from within Linux on the blade with the management module. That's how I get out status, temperature etc info. There's no reason this couldn't be used for other stuff too, and in theory could be used to exchange inter-blade data at I2C data rates.
The connector also passes out the RP2040's UART and SWD as I use this to flash the firmware into the RP2040. I haven't switched this into the backplane but in theory it could be too.
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.
Jeez, I'm a bit jealous of that compared to my 1g/1g service in the UK at £260 per month! I hate to think how much a commercial router/firewall fast enough to handle those kind of speeds would be. As others have suggested, building your own and running something like pfsense or vyos is the way to go. Best of luck, you're getting a fantastic deal there!