Rachel's Yard
| A New ContinuationMy original plan was to buy a small yet powerful server to run pfSense, so I can put it in my cabinet to act as firewall. Well that plan went well. I bought an Intel NUC with i3-4010U no 2.5", and a TP-LINK TL-SG2216. Since the Intel NUC has only one NIC, VLAN tagging is the way to go. Aka router on a stick:
Well it works really well. Since Hurricane Electric only gave me 100Mbps, so there is (in theory) no bottleneck (yet).
Then....I stumbled upon this: http://www.virten.net/2013/12/vmware-vsphere-homeserver-homelab-esxi-on-4th-gen-intel-nuc/
So I was thinking, how about I go the extra miles? Here it goes, running OpenStack on NUC. Fully featured.
The left most one is running pfSense router-on-a-stick, i3-4010U, 8GB of Crucial ram, and a MyDigitalSSD SC2 32GB.
The middle three are the Compute Nodes. Each has a i3-4010U, 2x8GB of Crucial sticks except the top one, the top NUC has Patriot Viper ram because Crucial is out of stock for some reasons. Each is running ADATA Premier Pro SP310 32GB mSATA just enough to boot. I plan to have 3 more SanDisk X110 2.5" to host the instance images and/or configuration files since the SP310 has a SLOW write speed.
The Controller Node with Xeon idles around 22W, NUC idles around 10W
The Controller Node on the right, a bigger box. It has a ASRock E3C224D2I, a Xeon E3-1220 V3, a single 8GB ECC DIMM because the Storage Node needs a DIMM, which we will talk about it later. The Controller Node is running the essential OpenStack services (Keystone, Horizon, etc) and nova-network (because Neutron is broken as fuck). It has a Samsung 840 EVO 120GB. The case is a Mini-Box M350, with a picoPSU-160-xt. Powering it with a 144W AC-DC brick.
The nova-network setup is inspired by https://www.mirantis.com/blog/openstack-networking-single-host-flatdhcpmanager/
For Storage, we have a Supermicro bare bone running a Intel Atom C2550. Running on a single 8GB DIMM ECC stolen from the Controller Node. I have a 8GBx4 coming so it will be fine. For Cinder and Glance, the storage is on ZFS-backed RAID 10. 4x500GB 2.5" 7200rpm from HGST. System and ZIL are on a Plextor m6E PCI-E SSD.
For switch, we have this:
Magnificent: