Lab Cluster Hardware

In my last post about my home lab, I mentioned I’d post again about the hardware. The majority of my lab is comprised of 3 Raspberries Pi with PoE Hats, a TP-Link 5-port Gigabit PoE switch, all in a GeekPi Cluster Case. Thanks to the PoE hats, I only need to power the switch and the switch powers the three nodes. I have an extended pass-through 40-pin header on the topmost Pi (the 3B+, currently) which allows the goofy “RGB” fan to be powered, which actually made the temps on the cluster much more consistent.

The topmost Pi is a 3B+, and the bottom two nodes are Raspberry Pi 4s (4 GB models). They’re super competent little nodes, and I’m really pleased with the performance I get from them.

Here’s a graph of 24-hours of the containers' CPU utilization across all nodes. You can see the only thing that’s making any of the Pis sweat is NZBGet, as I imagine the process of unpacking files is a bit CPU intensive.

Here’s my “instant” dashboard, which shows point-in-time health of the cluster. I’ll dig into this more at some point in the future.

The Plex container is running on my 2018 Mac mini, which I’m not currently monitoring in Grafana. That’s a to-do.