This is configuration for my homelab. It is a multi-master Kubernetes cluster with high availability.
I love watching YouTube – and watching all the tech-bloggers building their own home labs made me realize that I want the same: the cluster at home, a digital playground where I could play around with all the stuff, but to my own taste.
Being an ex-DevOps-lead for one of the largest investment banks, I have a certain bias about availability, disaster recovery and all boring controls stuff.
On top of that, I didn’t want to spend a ton of money on hardware which I would barely use (there’s a decent chance for that!), and I really wanted independent bare-metal hardware nodes, without any kind of VM virtualization – I want to be able to physically turn off any one of them, replace with newer / other, and do any kind of maintenance without any disruption.
Because of electricity prices and noise, I couldn’t buy used HP server and put it into server rack at home: each node would consume at least 200 W of power, and for high availability I need at least two of them.
So, inevitably this led to the weirdest solution of all possible – a multi-master Kubernetes cluster on Thin-Clients and mini-pcs!
| IP | Description |
|---|---|
| 192.168.178.0/23 | Subnet coming from router |
| 192.168.178.1 | Fritzbox router |
| 192.168.178.2 - 192.168.178.9 | Reserved for unknown future usages |
| 192.168.178.10 - 192.168.178.20 | Kubernetes nodes. I doubt I’ll ever have more than 10 physical k8s nodes at home |
| 192.168.178.100 - 192.168.178.255 | DHCP for devices. When I tried to count my smart bulbs and other IoT devices which loves to connect to wifi – I could get up to 50. Probably 150 is future-proof enough. |
| 192.168.179.1 | Virtual IP (keepalived) for master nodes |
| 192.168.178.2 - 192.168.178.10 | Reserved for unknown future usages |
| 192.168.179.11 - 192.168.179.255 | Virtual IPs for K8s services |
| Node name | IP | Roles | Device | CPU | RAM | Storage | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alfheimr | 192.168.178.10 | Worker | HP T620 | AMD GX-415 4*1.5Ghz core | 16Gb | 256GB SSD | 45$ + SSD + RAM | Bought used from some website |
| Midgard | 192.168.178.11 | Master | ThinkCenter M710q | i3 6100T 4*3.2GHz core | 16GB | 512GB SSD | 100$ + SSD + RAM | Bought used from a friend |
| Niflheimr | 192.168.178.12 | Master | Firebat AM02 | N100 4*3.4Ghz cores | 16GB | 512GB SSD | 160$ | Bought from AliExpress as new |
| Yotunheimr | 192.168.178.13 | Master | SOYO M2PLUS | N100 4*3.4Ghz cores | 16GB | 512GB SSD | 115$ | Bought from AliExpress as new |