I Just Dumped My Raspberry Pi Cluster! (A New Heart For My Smart Home, Part 4)

Drama and plot twist in the story of my smart home's heart! Ok, ok, no drama at all, but... I decided to not use a Raspberry Pi cluster anymore and in this video, I'll explain why.
00:00 - Intro
00:30 - The story of my cluster(s)
01:54 - The problem
04:10 - Replacing the cluster
05:19 - Prices compared
09:31 - Power usage
10:29 - Let's talk about software!
14:52 - What to do with the Raspberry Pi's?
15:30 - Closing thoughts
If you enjoyed this video and want to see more, please consider subscribing to my channel!
My secondary KZbin channel (behind the scenes, vlogs, personal projects):
- / @laszlomerczel140
My programming projects and Arduino code samples on GitHub:
- github.com/TheTinkerDad/
My 3D printing Projects on Thingiverse:
- www.thingiverse.com/TheTinker...
My published Docker images on DockerHub:
- hub.docker.com/u/thetinkerdad
Also check out the social media for more info on this page, about what I'm up to, etc:
- / thetinkerdad
- / thetinkerdad
- / thetinkerdad
Background music by Harris Heller - www.streambeats.com/

[@KornelKeseru]

Great video, thanks! I moved from Pi 4 to a dedicated Ubuntu server on a Pentium Gold G6405. I have 2x3.5 HDD for storage and ip cameras and 1x2.5 SSD for the system. I have an ~10% CPU load with HA, NVR, media, etc. and 22-23 watts power consumption. I'm really surprised about this, I expected it to be higher before building this system.

[@TheTinkerDad]

Hi Kornél, Nice to see you here! :) Thanks for sharing, it's a nice setup and 22-23 watts sounds fine! What is your NVR software of choice btw?

[@KornelKeseru]

I use Shinobi for NVR. I've tried a few alternatives but I found Shinobi the most flexible and it uses the CPU sparingly (with hardware acceleration). One more addition to my previous comment is that the machine is an ITX one.

[@TheTinkerDad]

Thanks! Never heard about Shinobi tbh, but as I'm in the process of rebuilding my closed loop camera network, I'm definitely going to try it!

[@jacquesb5248]

i also had some home automation. used GSMcommander controlled via sms.....open close gate, lights. alarm and even geyser with db kilowatt counters

[@michaelnjensen]

I'm going the opposite way, two days ago I bought hardware for a new server based on AMD Zen3 (5700G, 65w max TDP, alot lower in actual use), with 128GB mem, no spinning disks, just two NVMe disks, to replace an old Intel skylake based server, that was running proxmox, on this new one I'm switching completely to kubernetes, not a full blown k8s setup, but something simpler like K3s/minikube with a mix of a few KVM VMs, I just prefer k8s over docker/other container solutions, since I use k8s at work anyway, so what some might feel is overkill, I'm already really used to/like using. It's going to run Homeassistant/Netbox/Librenms/Unifi Controller/ in k8s, in addition some more heavy weight KVM VMs doing machine learning/vision, for my ip cameras, to detect various things/create events, thinking about getting a Google Coral USB based TPU, to offload ML to something even more efficient than using the CPUs. What I found to be most annoying on the old Skylake/Proxmox server was the low amount of memory available, kept hitting the limits, even with just containers, so my choices was either new consumer gear (AMD 5700G, cheap, builtin gfx, better than the intel alternatives, even with alder lake imho, it might be slightly faster but has double the TDP of Zen3, and more expensive CPU/MB), or finding old used server hardware, but the latter has a lot higher power usage, so skipped that idea. And I never really got to like the proxmox interface, it would hang far too many times on even simple tasks. Living in EU, power usage is big concern here as well.

[@TheTinkerDad]

Thanks for sharing! The system you've described would be pretty much overkill for my needs, but who knows, maybe in the future I'll switch from the Skylake too. :) How do you plan to use that system with K8s btw? VMs used as nodes or pods... or...?

[@Extra-galactic-loremaster]

One of my proxmox servers is a Zen 3 system. Runs like a dream.

[@reluxa]

In 2014 I bought a Q1900ITX board which has a 4 core 64bit Intel CPU which supports virtualization and it is backed by 8GB of RAM. This board and the CPU is totally fan-less. It's not the fastest machine which I can imagine for sure, but I think it is much-much faster than my RPI 3B. Primarily I am using that as an HTPC (Kodi, Spotify, KZbin, etc..) and apart from that it's running an Ubuntu in a Virtualbox which is my home server (that hosts a Redash, an mqtt broker, couple of personal webpages and projects, grafana, influx db, etc..) The idle power consumption is 11 watts which can climb up to 17 watts on full throttle. It's running 7/24 for ~7 years :).

[@TheTinkerDad]

Hi! Thanks for the detailed info on your setup - it sounds amazing you can run all that stuff on that little board! I remember I've kept eyeing the same board you have some years ago as a possible replacement for the E350M1 (the AMD Brazos board used as the "controller" in the video) which has similar characteristics, but much weaker on the CPU side. Tbh I'm a bit sad that nowadays they don't produce similar passive cooled ITX boards with integrated low-TDP CPUs, etc. Also, thanks for mentioning Redash - tbh I've never heard about it before, but it sounds intriguing to try and play around with :)

[@pavelperina7629]

I bought refurbished Fujitsu Q956 with i5-6500t, 8gb ram and 128gb ssd for 130eur. Then I bough 32gb of ram (a bit overkill), 1tb ssd for maybe another 130eur together. It's complete overkill at the moment, on the other hand, celeron based sbc with 2gb of ram was too weak. Idle power consumption is 5.5W, but realistic is 7-8W and maximum is between 35 and 40W. Only issue is a minor coil whine so it sounds a bit like it has mechanical hard drive, but I'm quite sensitive to that noise. I'm pretty happy with it.

[@FrankGraffagnino]

this is interesting... i went through the video quickly, so i'm sorry if I missed it, but have you selected the specific hardware for your new build? i'm looking forward to see what you pick. I'm interested in building up a proxmox server to run my VMs and have one of them to run most of my docker containers... but I think I need it to be quiet. Fanless would be great but at least just quiet would be good. Anyhow, looking forward to see how you proceed.

[@TheTinkerDad]

Hi Frank, Sorry for not noticing this comment earlier! So, yes, my idea was to run the thing with a 6700 or 6700K Skylake as currently those are quite nice when it comes to price (initial price + electricity bill) / performance. Regarding motherboard, I didn't have a specific model in mind, but I had some requirements like 4+ SATA3 ports and an Intel ethernet chip. Everything else like having an m.2 ssd slot or usb-3 was optional. I've ended up with an Asrock B150A-X1 which fulfilled my needs nicely. Honestly, I didn't want to spend a fortune for this server, but as soon as I start to really utilize the capabilities of Proxmox, I'll probably switch to something more powerful, also with low TDP in mind.

[@MrNoBSgiven]

Raspberry pi may have neen a nice idea, but with today's ridiculous price gouging makes PIes simply way too expensive. Running Proxmox on 8700 or 10700 processor with 64Gb of Ram will not only be cheaper than 4-5 8GB Pi cluster, but faster and simper to manage as well. One can run Proxmox in HA mode and use old 4-8GB PI 4 as a quorum machine. BTW, an old NUC with 8 thread processor can be had for around thr same money as one PI 4, and will run circles around it too. I do use old Pi 2 and Pi 3 to run a pi-hole +Unbound DNS "cluster" with VIP setup, and I love it. No DNS issues and spying unless Internet access dies. This also can be fixed for a price with two independent ISP providers if one is willing to pay.

[@andreaszweili8593]

I'm actually thinking about going into the opposite direction. My setup is currently and old Dell server which runs a couple of VMs which then again run various services in Docker. Beside the obvious motivation to learn something new I don't really feel that comfortable with the server. The performance is great but that is at the same time my problem, if it breaks I have to find something similar which could get really expensive. The idea with the Pis (or any consumer hardware) in a cluster is that it doesn't effect all my services if one fails and they aren't so expensive if I need to replace one. You mentioned that had to shuffle the services around on the Pis. Shouldn't something like Kubernetes take care of this? If that isn't the case then I basically have to get like 10 Pis or so...

[@TheTinkerDad]

Hi Andreas, Been there, done that, I started with one big server, then switched to the cluster. I haven't used Kubernetes as it felt like an overkill - I used a single centralized Portainer UI with Portainer agents installed on the PIs I used as Docker hosts. Right now, Proxmox looks like to be the best thing for a small home lab / home server like mine, but obviously time will tell - I still have the PIs, I can use them as backup or rebuild the same cluster in the future if I decide so.

[@azatecas]

Im just getting into clustering for learning purposes so the raspberry pi makes sense but for homeservers i think a used laptop/mini pc with a good CPU are more cost effective. For example you can buy an HP elitedesk on ebay with an i7 6th gen cpu and 8gb of ddr4 for less than 4 raspberry pis at msrp from official distributors. You would have to use usb3 for additional harddrives instead os sata

[@TheTinkerDad]

Yes, I pretty much came to the same conclusion - also, RPi supplies seem to be quite scarce nowadays :-/

[@jonjohnson2844]

I have an i5 4690T doing all sorts of automation, cctv, web hosting, database server, VMs, plex media server and loads of docker containers - works amazingly well and averages about 35w. I’ve actually just got a big passive CPU cooler to install so I’m guessing that will shave a few watts off.

[@TheTinkerDad]

Wow, 4th gen "T" CPUs are kind of a rare breed :) I can't even remember seeing one being sold where I live, not even when they were new on the market.

[@jonjohnson2844]

@@TheTinkerDad I got it from CEX online for £20

[@jj-icejoe6642]

I just came from R720 dual E5-2670 V2 to a HP ELITEDESK tiny Pc I7-6700t and 32GB. t for low tdp with 128GB SSD for os and iso and a 2TB nvme for LXC VM Docker and Portainer and run full of ressources silent and only 12 watts at idle 👌

[@atol71]

Wouldn't it be fun if there was a Linux kernel driver module that would send processor calculus requests to IP address on cluster where the RPI4 would calculate and send back response? This plugin could communicate availability and load and such and the cluster could be optimized.... One would end up in controller - slave architecture where slaves would be just giving processing power and it would look like one machine, the controller.

[@atol71]

SSD's and such could be bind together with NFS type NAS/raid and technically controller could just broadcast to network what systems support this method and send data for calculation to available resources. GPU calculus should have the same.... Oh well isn't this how Crypto mining works?

[@atol71]

Could someone now do a circuit board (basis on those with holes) with small transistors in-between holes that you could control with code (req. controller) to draw circuit with software? Added bonus would be a top layer where you could just stick the components like in a breadboard? For hat prototyping.....

[@neethology]

Funny, i went the opposite direction... Thank you for the interesting video.

[@jackfisher9833]

Poor raspberrys.. Are you just going to dump them like that? You bad.. LOL

[@TheTinkerDad]

No, not the Pi's :) I've just dropped the idea of using a Pi cluster for the smart home stuff.

[@MatejRajcan]

Dude, i will give you a simple thing you need, that will instantly improve your videos - Mind a wasted space above your head! Zoom in a little, it will look much more natural. Your hair can "touch" top of video, and it will still look ok.

[@TheTinkerDad]

Thanks for the hint!

[@SkysTrains]

dam oof. my server is so slow a pi would beat it anyday lol

[@dsuse3949]

to sum up. he doesnt know enough about computers to achieve what he set out to do. and he is selling now to take advantage of the current price increases of raspberry pis to make money

[@TheTinkerDad]

to sum up. You did not watch the video past the first 1-2 minutes and tried to guess the rest. No worries, the YT algorithm God appreciates your comment anyway. Have a Happy New Year mate.