Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs
37 comments
·January 17, 2025toprerules
lotharcable2
> The one thing I don't understand about these Pi based mini-racks is why you would build a home lab that's less powerful than your client devices.
It makes sense because you are unlikely to run production workloads at home.
So you don't really need a half a terabyte of RAM and a 220v power supply for the world's most expensive electric space heater.
Instead people are most often interested in developing infrastructure-as-code or testing deployment strategies or doing tests to see what happens when outages happen. Logging, metrics collecting, simulating network failure, simulating software attacks. etc.
In most of those cases having a number of smaller machines makes more sense then trying to emulate a small datacenter on a one or two big ones.
In practice I think most people end up with 2 or 3 'big machines' for times when they do need the Umph or want to have a big storage array for their "linux ISO collections". Then having a number of Pis or HP mini desktops in arrays is just for good fun.
If I want to simulate full blown workloads and benchmarking then I can just use AWS or Azure for that. A lot cheaper to lease verts for a evening or two, then buy big machines and leaving them idle 99.8% of the time.
monkmartinez
I generally agree with this sentiment and have struggled to put it into words. I have a beefy Dell Precision that I bought used for $200. This is where I simulate all the things; networking, container orchestration, services and more. I have upgraded to 128GB of ECC RAM, PCIe NVMe drives, and a 24GB quadro card. All in, I have about $800 invested. It's brittle as it is also my desktop so I delay updates and what not because I don't want to break anything. Not ideal.
So, now I am left with building another system and I need to decide form factor. Is this going to be headless or run a GUI of some kind with a monitor attached? Should I buy a big ole tower case or move to a 6u or 12u rack system. I want more VRAM and I need as much PCIe as possible. One thing for sure is that I don't want it to be Raspberry Pi based. I have two Pi4 collecting dust that were fun and impressive for what they are.
I saw these mini racks and wondered how they would work with an extended ATX board. Could these be useful as some kind of "open air" or mining type case where you simply bolt stuff on. Definitely going to investigate, so while the exact application of mini-racking pi's is not my jam, I am thankful that it was brought up.
j45
This is a great deal, if those kinds of parts could be moved into a rack pc type case, your computer could just go sideways.
Or you could just put the dell sideways on a rack shelf and be ok with it for now... while you decide what will go there.
opan
Low power device to leave on all the time, particularly for people who don't leave their clients on all the time. Like a router, but more versatile (although with a better OS on it, an actual router may do the same job).
toprerules
You can buy a Synology NAS for less than the cost of this rack and it will do everything this rack can do including running containers. You can build your own NAS and run Unraid or FreeNAS or what have you for even less.
numpad0
Or you can have that in a "rack" aesthetics and pretend you run a datacenter. The end result is negligibly different.
nordsieck
I feel like an m-series mac mini would be a really good fit for that - plenty of juice for when you need it, but very low idle power draw. The small size (especially for the m4 version) is an added benefit.
walterbell
M4 Mac Mini will be a good low-power LLM (e.g. photo semantic search) NAS once Asahi Linux supports USB/Thunderbolt storage.
irskep
In my case, it's because all my client devices are laptops, or locked down like Apple TV. It's nice to have a low-stakes experimentation box that can also be a Jellyfin server.
On the other hand, I don't go to the trouble this guy goes to. I just have a cheap mini PC plugged into Ethernet sitting on top of my router.
andrewaylett
The reason I'm considering a Pi cluster is resilience and repeatability. The reason I don't have one yet is because (like you) I'm unconvinced it's the right way to get that.
At least in theory, a Pi cluster has better failure modes than a single machine even if it's less powerful overall. And yes, I'm currently running on an old laptop -- but it's all a bit ad-hoc and I really want something a bit more uniform, ideally with at least some of the affordances I'm enjoying when deploying stuff professionally.
toprerules
Your house a single failure domain, you're not really going to be resilient to a lot of common failures, and most of these home labs have every device plugged into the same UPS, so there's really no difference between the power failure domain of 10 Pis and one desktop computer plugged into a UPS connected to your home router.
Do yourself a favor and buy a NAS and a compatible UPS. Any modern NAS software will speak one of the UPS IP protocols to handle graceful shutdown if your power goes off. Once you have the money, buy a second NAS and put it in a relatives house, set up a wireguard/tailscale tunnel between the two devices, and use it for offsite backups.
andrewaylett
It's not power failure I'm worried about, it's failure of other systems. But even so, yes, it's more likely that the systems that are supposed to ensure redundancy will fail than the otherwise-non-redundant services.
For what it's worth, my house isn't a single power domain -- I'm running some of my services on an old laptop that's still got some battery. But it goes to sleep if the power goes off, and needs physical intervention to recover. Which is an excellent example of redundant systems providing multiple single points of failure and of the perils of using random left-over hardware to run stuff.
j45
Separating storage, compute, and database into dedicated appliances makes sense for home labs. Getting redundant units early is key.
A pre-built NAS (configured to raid 5 at least) is worth the cost - storage should be set-and-forget since drives will fail and hot-swapping drives and automatic rebuilds should be zero downtime to life. Commercial NAS solutions have proven backup workflows.
For compute and databases, home setups can mirror to cloud or remote locations. Proxmox makes this straightforward with its web admin - just a few clicks to spin up replicas.
Modern consumer hardware and internet are quite reliable now. Business-grade equipment performs even better.
plagiarist
Some people suggest the thin clients as an option. You can buy them used and they're x86, usually expandable RAM and storage.
geerlingguy
Just a nit; the mini rack has nothing to do with Pis per-se. One of the racks in the post features a Radxa N100 as the primary node, and other builds in the showcase feature various mini PCs (new and quite old). All of which have a lot more oomph than a Pi.
There are also other Arm SBCs that are much faster (and more efficient) than a Pi, like the Orange Pi 5 Max. Many homelab-related apps run just as well if not better on that, just have to make sure to settle on a supported OS distro.
Zanfa
I don’t think most people have the space to fit a 24U rack at home. Or tolerate the noise and power consumption of typical 19” hardware. Or cost.
j45
24U is about half a rack? 3 feet tall or so. Now, there can be a full length rack (or cage) that has 4 posts, or there's short racks too with just the front 2 posts that can shrink the footprint a lot. This is totally reasonable to find used most places.
Noise and Power Consumption is a huge consideration. I think about it as cost of gpu or computing power per watt. While the information might not be out there, USFF devices like a one or a few Lenovo Thinkcentre m920q works pretty flawlessly with Proxmox or anything else. For a rack, they can be treated as quasi blade servers on a shelf stacked in a rack, or some cases as well. Again, up to most people
These types of USFF devices often have a desktop grade cpu in a mobile setup that is engineering/industrial grade built, and 130w power supplies, and mostly idling. There are newer generations of these types of devices from most of the manufacturers too.
Cost of electricity does add up, but more than that, keeping your wattage footprint low lets you use a more reasonable UPS for battery backup power, if there is a need, it can all stay up much, much longer.
skydhash
I don't have a homelab, but I have an old mac mini (that I put Debian on) as an always-on file server and other self-hosted software. I also have a 1L office pc as my main desktop (freebsd) with a couple of dev VMs (alpine linux). Both draw very little power, which is important for me as I'm on solar.
I have an M1 Mini which is more powerful than any of these, but MacOS is not really suitable for tinkering and anything that's not Apple(TM).
dchuk
I have zero need for a portable raspberry pi cluster but damn is this cool anyway.
Also, I learned about this device from this post and immediately bought one for my existing home server remote access: https://jetkvm.com/
BeefWellington
This is less about the Pi and more about the form factor.
walterbell
404 on open-source code? https://jetkvm.com/docs/getting-started/open-source
geerlingguy
The code is on their GitHub: https://github.com/jetkvm/kvm (almost everything up, not sure about the base image yet, but they said it's coming).
I'll mention the broken link on their Discord.
JKCalhoun
Yeah, I have zero need too ... until there is no power where I live. Thinking the prepper-minded might like the idea of an off-grid network.
roflchoppa
It’s the storage factor that is appealing to me. Gone are the days of 4 devices sprawled in the closet…
Holy moly these are getting expensive 1k for something that goes in the closet is wild.
This was posted a while back, it has some good resources.
walrus01
There are a few pseudo standards for "half width" 1U devices, one of the more notable vendors is mikrotik which makes devices that can be mounted as two units in 1U.
https://mikrotik.com/product/rmk2_10
looks like this: https://cdn.mikrotik.com/web-assets/rb_images/2242_hi_res.pn...
I wish there was some kind of firmly defined standard for exactly half of a 1U width so that different manufacturers' devices could be attached together.
disambiguation
This feels kind of like a miniature train model, but for data centers. It's cool and all, but it offers neither storage, compute, or networking in a way that I would consider paying that price tag.
null
The one thing I don't understand about these Pi based mini-racks is why you would build a home lab that's less powerful than your client devices. My 24 U rack exists precisely because I want on demand, large amounts of compute/GPU for compiling, transcoding, encrypting, etc. and the cloud is too expensive. If you're going to make the investment into any type of home labbing, why gimp yourself with devices that can only run small services you could run on a single old desktop using containers?