Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs

> 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have a HP EliteDesk (kinda like a n100) running Home Assistant and a pi4 running piHole. A lil mini rack can tidy this all up while also having room for a NVIDIA Digits and maybe a NAS. Its for hobbyists and people without alot of space. You can have a bunch of low power/low noise systems in a tiny little rack. I think it rocks.

I would think, for fun and learning?

I feel like this concept will be useful in other situations, too, not just homelabs. I wouldn't be surprised at all to spot one of these controlling a temporary venue.

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).

What if I told you that a modern MBP has more IOPs (and faster individual cores) than servers that many large companies use?

A homelab, running something like Proxmox, spends a great deal of it's time mostly idling with the odd thing spiking for basic homelab tasks (storage, sharing, etc).

Doing GPU/intensive type tasks is more purpose driven than a homelab. For this, you can get a NAS with dedicated GPU for transcoding if you wanted, etc.

The call for large amounts of compute/GPU makes a lot of sense, and there's a lot of ways to get there depending on what's needed, relative to the electricity bill you're OK with if it ends up idling a lot more than anticipated.

Adding a mac mini/studio for crunching certain things might be enough for a single person or household. Adding other demands or users beyond that could change it.

I'm familiar with racks and gear, and had way too much of it when I pulled out of datacenters and went more virtual and cloud. The nice thing now is a lot of that virtualization can come home with a bit of the data center (power backups, internet backups, etc)

I think it’s the difference of budget and type of homelab. Some people homelab for production (smart home, nas, media server) and others for learning and development, and building a small complete network either multi pi or low cost devices is a great way to get experience.

I have to concur with this because the whole idea of a "pi" based homelab is just too anemic for my purposes, when you can spend as little as 200 bucks and get some older x86-64 quad core, 32GB RAM desktop PC from a Dell enterprise series of midtower desktops, which will serve as a much more powerful hypervisor. Spend just a little bit more and you're looking at Dell Precision systems with 64 or 128GB of RAM.

404 on open-source code? https://jetkvm.com/docs/getting-started/open-source

This is less about the Pi and more about the form factor.

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.

The 10" rack is the de facto standard half-width rack. It uses the same spacing as 19" inch racks. My understanding is that two 8.75" devices fit in 19" rack with mounting bracket in the center.

I think the real counterpoint is that you can built a single-box homelab using something like this: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2024/12/26/2330 … and never need another box.