Hello!
I’d like to organize a workshop with our company Dwellir (https://dwellir.com) in which we would play around creating a microcloud using some very cheap devices for our crew. We mean to buy a full set for all participants, for example a pile of RaspBerry Pis or similar, enough to build a full cluster.
What would you recommend to buy for this kind of lab/experiment/learning-session to keep the budget low - but still possible?
Hello Erik,
The LXD team has been looking for a hardware kits to demo MicroCloud (LXD, MicroCeph and MicroOVN). So far we have found this case/enclosure to pair with 3x Odroid H3+. This is probably too expensive to provide to each participants but maybe some will find it interesting if they want to buy a powerful and self-contained cluster.
We should soon make a purchase of that kit or something similar. If you’d like we’d be happy to share our experience with it.
This is exactly what we found as well and I think we will buy a few of them for our team to test with. When do you plan to do this ?
From that, we are looking for something bigger suitable for real production grade. We would like to collaborate with you for sure on this topic.
We’ll be meeting on Friday to decide on what to buy and should order soon after.
I’ll see if we can follow your tracks there. But we are even more looking for a production grade solution which can scale to about 8 hosts where we can maintain over time as well and be able to send quantities of data between hosts.
We would need to get advice and help here.
I would love to hear what you guys found if you could share afterwards.
@sdeziel1 - I’m about to start purchasing next week - can we connect and discuss such that we could perhaps coordinate efforts?
@erik-lonroth, I’m afraid we didn’t make much progress on this front. We found a few other possible candidate kits and also went on a tangent to look at more enterprise-y gear (something to go in a portable rack). Once we buy something, I’ll do a post in here explaining the what, why and where we bought it.
@sdeziel1 right. So we will then probably progress by purchasing some normal desktop computers with dual nics and start setting up.
We would like to have some help from you guys in producing a reference implementation for this such as to be able to work with this over a few sites. Do you have such a reference implementation available or care to work with us to produce one?
Is microcloud production ready?
I recently set up a lxd cluster and decided to run ovn and ceph by myself since microovn and microceph don’t seem to be stable yet. Did some testing on upgrading microceph and it was raising some issues, for example.
Since you’re mentioning hardware, at home I run a small cluster on some Intel J4125 mini pcs with 8GB of RAM. At the university I run it on Ryzen 5700G and Intel 12700. They’re somewhat fine for their use cases.
We are planning a stable release at the end of October. If you come across issues during testing, please share more details or create a Github issue, it’s helpful for us as we’re ironing out the kinks.
@erik-lonroth Here’s the Bill Of Material for our demo kit.
Note that despite having an enclosure for 6 SBCs, we only put 3 in and used the other side to put the SATA SSDs.
The demo kit was used during MicroCloud launch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os0tAhlWTeg
We ended up buying 3 mini workstations that had 2 nics and works now beautifully in our lab.