In my previous post, I laid out my rough ambitions for an at-home kubernetes cluster that looks enough like the real thing that I could use it for light workloads at home and practice with kubectl a bit more often. In this post, I’ll go over the atoms that will make everything go.
I wanted to balance some competing concerns with this project. I wanted to keep up-front costs down, so my compute nodes had to be cheap. I also wanted on-going costs (eg electricity) to be low also, so buying old Xeon servers wasn’t going to do the trick. This needed to be quiet and to fit on or in my network rack, too. I also didn’t want to stray from x86 land which ruled out Raspberry Pi’s and their clones.
Micro pcs were the first place I looked since they tend to have low TDP processors, small footprints, and reasonable availability at a good price. In particular, I wanted pcs with the Intel Core i5-6500T or the Intel Core i7-9700T. These two processors both consume 35W by themselves (before adding in the rest of the system) and are reasonably performant for that small power budget. The i5 is about twice as powerful as a Raspberry Pi 5 in benchmarks, and the i7 is twice as powerful as that with twice the cores and a faster clock than the i5. The Dell Optiplex Micro line and the HP EliteDesk Mini series both have models with either of the above processors, so my hunt came down to which ones offered better prices. I waited for decent prices on eBay and picked up a couple of Optiplex Micro 3040 and a couple of Optiplex Micro 5070.
Once they arrived, I tested each machine to make sure they posted and could see the included storage. Each machine got a quick dusting with an air compressor and the newest bios applied before being buttoned back up. For the container OS, I chose Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS. There are, of course, tailor made distros just for running containerized workloads. Flatcar in particular seems to get a lot of love on social media, but with a limited time budget, I opted for boring old Ubuntu since I know how it works. I won’t go into detail on the installation process since it’s not too complicated and may vary depending on what metal you are using.
At this point, I secured my machines in the rack (check out my sweet 1U rack mounts), attached them to power and network, made sure they got DHCP addresses, and SSH’d into each one to make sure I could do everything else from a chair with lumbar support. Until this point, we haven’t done anything kubernetes-y, but that’ll change in the next post. I’ll run through the process I used to get a shiny new cluster up and to get kubectl connected to it in under an hour. Cheers!