Comment by j1elo
I went in thinking that maybe there's something to learn for my grand total of 1 ThinkCentre M910q "homelab", but this author's setup is on another league, I'm sure closer (or surpassing) the needs of a small/medium company!
I went in thinking that maybe there's something to learn for my grand total of 1 ThinkCentre M910q "homelab", but this author's setup is on another league, I'm sure closer (or surpassing) the needs of a small/medium company!
It’s another league, but I don’t get the point of mixing enterprise rack-mounts with Raspberry Pis.
Pis are a relatively quick and cheap (including power) way to get "another computer" that isn't a VM or otherwise dependent.
VMs can add a lot of complexity that you don't really need or want to manage.
And (perhaps unadmitted) lots of people bought Pis and then searched for use cases for them.
They're really not that cheap anymore, though. If you just need "another computer" you can probably find something more capable in the used market.
They never were terribly cheap, but there was a time when people who hadn't seen a single-board computer (that small) and didn't really keep abreast of the used market gobbled them up.
One advantage over the used market is that you can easily keep getting the exact same one over and over again.
You'd be delighted (or terrified) to know that I just added an old gaming computer in a 4U case to the cluster, so I can play with PCI/GPU passthrough.
The Dell is essentially the main machine that runs everything we actually use - the other hardware is either used as redundancy or for experiments (or both). I got the Pi from a work thing and this has been a fun use case. Not that I necessarily recommend it...
Here is an actual another league if you are curious about it https://youtu.be/-b3t37SIyBs