[kwlug-disc] Small, ARM64-based computers (was: Raspberry pi 4)

[Mark Steffen]

Yes... I'd love to build an arm-based kubernetes cluster.  And your 
concerns are shared.  I'd love something like:

-Octa core A7x (A72 is a bit old hat these days, something faster 
ideally) or even a 4/4 BIG little approach with A55s and A75s or something.

-8GB RAM minimum but 16GB or SODIMM slots as an option (ECC support??)

-Dual Gigabit Ethernet with POE support and optional battery (lots of 
good reasons for this, one being you could speed up synchronous writes 
in a cluster by making them asynchronous since you should be able to 
survive a sudden power outage) and regular power plug and support for 
automatic switching between the two for redundancy

-eMMC, dual SATA, dual NVME M.2, PCIe slot, USB3

-a form factor conducive to clustering/rackmounting (status lights/power 
positioned that some one could make a case/power backplane for it where 
you could slide the SBCs in and out of easily for repair/maintenance)

Kubernetes with Gluster would be my preference, if both ethernet ports 
supported POE then you could have both switches able to provide power 
and configure primary/secondary VLANs but in a way that if everything is 
good you have a gigabit dedicated to regular network and a gigabit 
dedicated to cluster sync network for Gluster.  OS would be on the eMMC 
and the NVME M.2s would be gluster bricks.

That would be my dream ARM cluster setup though.  Some nodes would be 
Galera or Postgres database nodes to cluster that service.  But it 
should allow for a very scalable and resilient base for whatever 
applications you'd want to throw at it.

Mark

On 2021-12-07 2:28 p.m., Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Ronald Barnes (ron at ronaldbarnes.ca):
>
> [Pine64 Quartz SoC, https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Quartz64 :]
>
>> That PCIe expansion slot is intriguing!
> In sub-model A.  There's also sub-model B, which offers M.2.
>
>> The value of which cannot be overstated.  Adding expansion storage
>> to my rPi 4 would be more expensive than anticipated and somewhat of
>> a hassle.
> The 8GB LPDDR4 RAM option is likewise getting up into real-computer
> territory, and I note that sub-model A also has one (1) SATA 3.0 header.
> The immediately preceding ROCKPro64 SoC
> (https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/ROCKPro64) also merits respect, but maxes
> out at 4GB LPDDR4 RAM.
>
> I keep watching the ARM single-board computer marketplace for units
> fully suited to home-server usage, and ideally want the hardware to
> include:
>
> o  8 GB or greater RAM, so that I can comfortably run a pair of VMs
>     under a hardened small host system.  There are certainly other
>     ways to do this, but the two-VMs model provides a production server
>     host alongside an in-development beta host that will be rolled out
>     on flag day by simply promoting (re-IPing) the beta to production,
>     and starting a new beta VM.
>
> o  RAID1 redundant main storage on something better/faster/more-reliable than
>     USB 3.0-attached or microSD or eMMC storage.  Like, guys?  NVMe SSD
>     storage on an M.2 slot is a terrific idea, but why not two slots, please?
>
> o  Fanless, silent, and low-power, which is where ARM64 helps.
>
> The generally meritorious hardkernel.com ODROID SoCs mentioned upthread
> share with the Pine64 being less limited than the RPis, but to my
> knowledge none of their units yet ticks all of my checkboxes for an
> in-home server platform.
>
> The marketplace doesn't recognise the existence of a home-server niche
> (which is understandable, as those of us who want robust computing
> infrastructure at home are "rara avibus".  Over the last decade, the
> niche that seemed closest to filling home-server needs, it seemes to me,
> has been the HTPC (home theatre PC) one, like low-power AMD-based
> mini-ITX boxes with a pair of SATA drives.  With the rise of ARM64 /
> aarch64, we are now seeing additional possibles.
>
>
>
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