I finally bought a single machine that lets me grow a little cloud at home. My intention is to use it to look into various DevOps tools, including some that don’t fit well on a typical PC. The banner image shows the 40 virtual cores I now see in htop. The image was taken a couple of seconds after simultaneously rebooting five VMs, each with 4 CPUs and 8GB RAM.
I think there’s room for more. I’m going to need it.
The Gear
The machine is a refurbished DELL Precision Tower 7810 with two Xeon E5-2650 v3 processors and 64 GB of ECC RAM. For storage I’ve used four 512 GB SSDs, along with a hot-swappable SATA drive tray for local backups to spinning metal.
The Vision
I need to get better using Kubernetes, but I want some practice time in a reasonably complex environment. Single node K8S learning environments are great, but I need to see how a cluster might behave when you throw it curve balls. I’d also like to see how certain applications behave when they got tossed around in those stormy seas.
Since much of the work I do involves a mix of container and non-container deployments I also want to experiment with other forms of provisioning and maintenance. This will include using localstack as an affordable way to learn AWS automation. It will probably also include some network emulation with GNS3.
Finally, I have some hand-wavy ideas about hyper-convergence that I’d like to explore in an affordable space before I spend real money (mine or anybody else’s) on a production grade hyper-converged on-prem cloud. To do this I plan to mock up an oVirt cluster using nested virtualization.
Out of Scope
Clearly this is NOT a performance testing lab. The lack of a second machine seals that deal pretty conclusively. Also off the table are any vendor-specific tools (with the exception of the AWS support in localstack). I am also not likely to host any MS Windows instances, preferring a purely open source solution.