My current Kubernetes (K3s) cluster consists of 12 nodes:
- 3 x Dell M92p Tiny control nodes, each with an Intel i5-3470T 2.90GHz (2/4) CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 120GB SSD
- 9 x Dell M92p Tiny worker nodes each with an Intel i5-3470T 2.90GHz (2/4) CPU, 16GB of RAM and a 120GB SSD
I am using 6 x 64W power supplies with some home made splitters to supply them with power (1 x 64W PSU supplies 2 x M92p Tiny servers).
This effectively gives me 36 CPU threads, 144GB of RAM and 540GB of storage (60GB per worker node) to play with.
The Intel i5-3470T has a multithread rating of 2981 and a single thread rating of 1812
I also have a Dell r210 ii that has an Intel Xeon E3-1280 3.1GHz (4/8) CPU, 32GB of RAM, 4 x 64GB SSDs and 4 x 300GB SAS drives, this currently runs XC-PNG and Xen-Orchestra for any virtual machines I need to run that don’t play nice with Kubernetes.
This gives me 8 CPU threads, 144GB of RAM, 80GB of SSD space for O/S disks and 600GB of data space (the disks are all mirrored in a RAID 1+0 setup)
The Intel Xeon E3-1280 has a multithread rating of 5615 and a single thread rating of 1804
The intention is to replace all of the above servers with a new cluster that is also connected to my NAS build.
The cluster will have the following configuration:
4 x Dell M920q Tiny nodes, each with an Intel i5-9500T 2.2GHz (6/6) CPU, 32GB of RAM, 64GB O/S nvme SSD, 1TB data nvme SSD, Dual 10Gb SFP+ NICs, and a 90W PSU
This new cluster should provide me with 24 CPU threads, 128GB of RAM and 4TB of data storage all accessible via 10Gb networking in addition to the NAS server
The Intel i5-9500T has a multithread rating of 8713 and a single thread rating of 2150
In theory, the processing power of the 4 new servers should exceed that of the previous 9 plus the r210 ii, but we will have to wait and see, I can always add an additional node or two.
The new servers should also draw less power than the current ones.
Once the new cluster is live, I will probably sell most of the Dell M92p Tiny servers, which will ultimately pay for the new servers, although I am undecided on wether or not I will also sell the Dell r210 ii.
The intention is to run ProxMox as the base Operating System on each of these nodes, then create a number of virtual machines on them:
- 3 x K3S control nodes
- 4 x K3s Worker nodes
- 1 x Unifi Control VM
- 1 x Pterodactyl VM
- 1 x Wings VM
- 1 x Rancher VM
I will also run ProxMox on the NAS server and then run TrueNAS as a VM on that