STH Project TinyMiniMicro Home Lab Revolution Introduction

hey guys this is patrick from sth and today we have the introduction of project tiny mini micro now this is a project that i have wanted to do for absolutely years and specifically it's targeting those individuals who just need a pretty simple server i mean those are the folks that may need an ap controller they may need something like a voice over ip controller and just kind of simple applications in a small footprint these servers are absolutely perfect small servers for the home now if you want to go a little bit bigger and you want to get something like a clustered server this is also a pretty good solution now project tiny mini micro actually comes from the name of these this class of devices and the manufacturers that actually produce them in huge quantities and those are lenovo hp and dell so if you're wondering we're going to be using the lenovo tiny nodes we're going to be using the hp mini nodes and then we're going to be using the dell micro nodes now we're going to get into the details of all of these things and if you haven't seen from the thumbnail pick of this video we have a whole bunch of these we're going to talk about a little bit later but what i did want to do is just kind of talk about why why would we even look at this class of device versus looking at other options on the market personally what got me very interested in these is just number one they're low cost but then also there are a lot of applications nowadays that assume that you're going to be running a cluster of machines and not just one machine as the cloud providers and things like kubernetes have gotten very popular the idea of scaling out infrastructure to multiple nodes as kind of a default behavior has become basically the norm but the reasons behind it make a lot of sense i mean with multiple nodes you can have things like high availability and fault tolerance that you don't really get if you have a single node and using pcs as servers especially at the edge may seem completely crazy but let's not forget that chick-fil-a actually uses intel nuk devices in their retail locations to provide on-site kubernetes clusters so this isn't something that's just a totally random idea i mean there is literally a large company deploying edge kubernetes using basically desktop pcs and that brings us to a question patrick why aren't you using intel nux here and there's a really good reason for that now nux are very cool machines i actually really like them and they're very hip i mean people get very excited about intel nux but on the other hand dell hpe and lenovo sell an absolute ton of these tiny mini micro systems and because they do that the quality on them is just absolutely in a completely different tier they're generally available on the second hand market for a very pretty low price because there's tons of them and well they come up for second hand market quite often and the other kind of cool thing about them is that they have much better support i mean the documentation behind these nodes is just absolutely amazing so there's a lot going for them and also if you wanted to build something like a chick-fil-a edge compute platform for your business remember that these little nodes actually have the ability to have on-site support which you don't really have with normal nut sails but you can actually go get these nodes and have lenovo dell or hp show up and fix anything that goes wrong and just touching specifically on the lab environment a lot of times people are using used gear and when you do that and you look at the class of nodes that we're seeing here all the nodes that we purchased are basically between about two hundred dollars and four hundred dollars and the vast majority of them are basically in the maybe 225 to 325 range one of the big drivers here is that these things are sold an absolutely massive deals and when companies decide that it's time to do a refresh there are other events like such as a company going bankrupt to going out of business and they no longer need the pcs so they get liquidated and there's a lot of events that lead to these units hitting the secondary market and in just ginormous quantities i mean the number of units sold for these versus like a consumer motherboard is just many many to one now if you saw some of our hpe proliant microserver gen10 plus coverage you'll notice that we were actually making a cluster with that and that actually made us kind of really look at these classes of devices because we had these fairly small server boxes but they were still pretty big and we wanted something that was a little bit smaller a little bit less costly but we didn't necessarily need three and a half inch disk support and these fit the bill just perfectly the general layout of these things is all pretty much the same you get a number of usb ports and display outputs on the front and rear of the units now the display out ports usually you get display ports sometimes you get up to three display ports sometimes you get some hdmi or vga mixed in there sometimes you don't get as many but that's certainly something that's kind of cool you almost always get multi-monitor support you have a processor that's sometimes socketed which means that you can actually upgrade these things power is provided by an external power brick on all of the units and that's just pretty standard but the power bricks actually come from the company's laptop lines and so they're something that you can actually go out and get replacements for super easily storage is usually a two and a half inch internal disc along with an m.2 form factor drive so in most of these units you can get say an nvme ssd plus a sata ssd so if you want to go build a little bit of storage in these units it totally works there's usually two so dim slots especially nowadays ddr4 so dim slots and so hitting up to 32 gigs of memory is fairly inexpensive and if you just want 16 gigs of memory well that's very inexpensive to do it usually costs about 55 the processors themselves there are some two core units but realistically most of them these days are core i5 so you'll see four core four thread units and some of the newer core i3s we're doing the same thing but you also can find units with features like six core six thread core i5s and some of the later models again these are not huge units and we just did a video on barbecue and virtualization where we talked about why you actually want a larger node over a bunch of separate smaller nodes using barbecue as an example but still there are many cases where you do want to have separate nodes and this is a good example of where you can get something fairly inexpensively now of course i think a lot of you are going to be saying hey patrick what about the raspberry pi 4 and actually the raspberry pi 4 8 gigabyte did precipitate this entire project when i heard that the raspberry pi 4 8 gigabyte models were launched i got really excited and i started ordering them and specifically what i did was i ordered it from canikit because well i like to support the community i know you can get the devices and all the components a little bit less expensively but realistically it's nice to have someone else just go pick it up out and get you a kit that is easy to use without having to think about it and i'm more than happy to go support the community by throwing a couple extra dollars that way but the pricing on the raspberry pi is a little bit of a misnomer right i mean if you get the actual unit for 75 dollars you can't turn it on you may have some cooling issues you don't have a case i mean there's a whole bunch of things that you need before you really get started with the raspberry pi for eight gigabyte model so i got two of the candy kit raspberry pi 4 8 gigabyte starter kits that were about 140 before tax and shipping they took so long to arrive that i decided well maybe there's another option and is there an x86 option that i can just use and that's how we got on this entire tiny mini micro project so by the time they arrived i realized that the raspberry pi 4 8 gigabyte they're actually really cool devices especially if you want to go and put them on a little robotics project or something like that where you need that small form factor in super low power consumption they actually work really well but if you kind of think about it you're getting basically for about 140 dollars you're getting a 8 gigabyte machine with some low core count arm cpus and on the tiny mini micro side in the 250 dollar range i'm usually getting a 256 gigabyte ssd so we're not using an sd card for storage here and i'm also getting up to either eight or 16 gigs of ram plus a quad core processor plus in a lot of cases i actually have the option for nvme ssd so the ssds are much higher quality the cases are much higher quality on the tiny mini micro units and so overall i think that there's actually a case to be made that these are fairly at least fairly analogous to what you get in the raspberry pi side now raspberry pi's do use way less power but on the other hand the tiny micro nodes actually use less power especially in idle than you typically see from server nodes so again i don't want anybody to think like oh hey you should definitely be using the raspberry pi 4 why is patrick not using that it's not that i don't like the raspberry pi 4 i mean order a bunch of them it's actually just the fact that i kind of found this as an alternative to somebody that maybe wants an x86 platform or more robust platform than what the raspberry pi offers there are all kinds of different people out there so i think it's important to kind of give people options so let's talk about getting into project mini micro a little bit because we've talked about the nodes already but let's talk about what happened so the first ones i bought were actually hp mini i think they were like the 705 g3 mini and they use these amd pro a6 processors and those are absolutely anemic core wise but the interesting things i at least thought about these those was was that i purchased them for like under 225 dollars they had 16 gigabytes of ram they also had a 256 gig sata ssd and so i was just looking at i was like well that ram is actually pretty good the ssd is pretty good and it makes the processor basically free i have to say that they were definitely not the best value even though the ram and ssds were great and for some people that are actually going to work out super well but for me and what i was looking for they were not the right option and that kind of started down the path of this going from being a single purchase to actually being an entire project and then i realized what might be the absolute most killer feature of the entire segment by far and that is that these nodes actually come usually and not always with windows 10 pro now the way that the model works is that the windows 10 pro license is actually tied to the motherboard and firmware in these units so therefore you actually get a licensed windows 10 pro installation for these machines without even having to put in the license key what's really important here and i want to make this very clear is that not all of them come with that some come with windows 10. home there are also some that come with dos and so they don't come with windows 10 pro so one thing that you have to be a little bit wary of is if you do specifically want that feature because you're not going to run linux or vmware or something like that on these you need to look for it windows 10 pro is a huge deal i mean remember most of these units that we're buying are in the 200 to 300 range and a windows 10 pro license by itself is like i don't know 140 bucks or something like that so you're getting an amazing software value just irrespective of anything else and you actually get features in these things that are really useful such as you can do things like you do remote desktop you can also have active directory integration and so there are definitely use cases here that are super useful to have the pro license versus a normal home license and windows 10 pro is actually super cool for another reason and that's that microsoft has really gone in on the windows subsystem for linux 2 and now you can actually run things in windows and still have a linux environment and perhaps the one thing that got me completely hooked by this was when i actually got the first unit and i realized i could have windows 10 pro running and then underneath have kubernetes running on wsl 2. let me explain why that is the coolest feature you can actually have a windows 10 pro box that you put out and you give to a significant other to a kid whatever you have someone you can put out your windows 10 pro box and they think hey i have an awesome desktop experience i may have 16 gigs of ram i can go browse using google pro microsoft edge or whatever it is these machines are meant to be great desktops for business productivity so anything that falls in that watching youtube videos all that kind of stuff you can totally go do that on the windows 10 pro but where this gets really exciting is that in a lot of cases you can actually run your lab on a linux box if you're running on wsl 2 box you're running linux you can actually have an entire lab that nobody really knows about you could be giving your kid a little box your significant other may think that you're just being a benevolent person purchasing your child a box and guess what it's actually part of your lab because it's running wsl2 underneath this is the absolute definition of a stealth lab the other thing is that these things are super small so even if you just want to go build a little stack of them you can actually stack them on top of one another when i did that next to an hp microserver gen10 plus what i noticed was that basically you can go have an entire cluster in the footprint of a single xeon e 2200 series node so once i realized that we had a great hardware value some extra software value add i looked at this and i said okay this is something that could be an awesome project and that's when i just started buying nodes so at the time i'm recording this we've already purchased 18 nodes with 15 different models this is escalated very quickly we've purchased a bunch of units specifically the hp elite desk and pro desk mini units we have a bunch of those we also have the lenovo tiny units we have the dell optiplex micro units and so we have a whole bunch of different types of nodes we've also purchased them from different sources which means that we've hit some of the pitfalls we've seen machines that are perfectly clean we've also seen some so dirty that they basically didn't work without a proper cleaning we've seen nodes that were advertised as one thing that showed up as something completely different at least in different specs we've seen some nodes that have some funky internal bits that we weren't expecting and so by getting a whole bunch of these nodes and working with them for the past month we've actually learned so much more than if we only had one or two of these nodes if you're wondering about the power consumption and performance well the power consumption at idle is actually really interesting we can get idle usually it'd be about nine to maybe 12 watt range plus or minus one watt on either side and that's really good because on a server like the hp microserver gen10 plus or any other kind of server even if you have the main server off the baseboard management controller actually uses usually north of four and a half to maybe six watts and because that uses so much power even when you have this system on your idle power consumption is way over 10 watts so these units are actually built to be extremely power efficient because they don't have those baseboard management controllers performance of them is not as good as the xeon e2200 you may say hey they come with four quarter eight core processors why is it not the same performance as the ne 2200 series and there's a really simple answer for that these things are usually 35 watt tdp parts and they just don't have the thermal headroom to go and hit the same performance as you would see in some of the higher nz 2200 series models what you do get is performance call it maybe from some of the higher end atom c3000 series machines to kind of the lower middle end of the ziony 2200 series and we've done a whole bunch of benchmarks so we're going to be releasing that information kind of in a more up-level data set pretty soon management on these boxes is super interesting because you can actually get either intel amt or vpro and you can also get amd dash now what that means is that you actually get things like remote power on and off even though you don't have a traditional baseboard management controller like you would have in a normal server with vpro you can actually get a special realvnc viewer that allows you to get things like remote management and remote kvm these solutions are really meant more for a desktop environment they're not as good as what you get in servers and what you're going to notice is that the dell poweredge t40 doesn't have it either because the idrac controller actually costs too much money and so they use intel amt and vpro just like these corporate desktops now there's amd dash and there's intel vpro and amt but what we found was that they're not always enabled on all the boxes and it's not necessarily easy to tell which ones are and which ones are not because intel amt and vpro actually has a different set of features if it's designed to potentially be exported to certain countries again this is stuff that we've learned with project tiny mini micro because we've purchased so many units there's things that you just find like that there are also units that just simply use lower end chipsets so don't have things like the remote kvm functionality so if you can't tell we're running an entire series on this this is going to be an awesome project i just want to do a quick video to introduce what we're doing now if you go out and purchase these units today just know that there's a huge variability in terms of what you get the goal of project tiny meeting micro is to really break down what those differences are and help you as a buyer figure out okay if i'm gonna go build a low power low cost cluster for my home environment what does that look like and what should i be looking for in any of the used listings out there and by the way any of this stuff is super translatable to something that even if you needed to purchase new machines for your work or corporate environment you wanted to do something like chick-fil-a did where you're using these nodes as edge kubernetes servers this is totally translatable to that as well you can even just go buy the nodes and get them with on-site warranty support no problem so this is something that is actually a prototype that you can pull directly into production very easily so if you can't tell i'm super excited about project tiny mini micro we've been working on it for over a month now and we have some really cool things that are going to be coming out so stay tuned to the sth youtube channel definitely subscribe check out the sth main site because we're going to have new content on this throughout the summer as always thanks for watching and have an awesome day

Channel: ServeTheHome

Views: 105,359

Keywords: HP, hp mini, hp mini pc, lenovo, lenovo tiny, lenovo tiny pc, dell, dell micro, dell micro pc, TinyMiniMicro, Intel, AMD, vPro, AMD dash

Id: bx4_QCX_khU

Length: 18min 17sec (1097 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I've got 3 USFF Optiplex 9020 clustered running at work and one SFF at home and honestly if it weren't for the lack of PCIe expansion I'd go smaller yet.

[u/squeekymouse89]

Honestly the price of them has gone up massively recently anyway. I used to be able to get one for £50 - 60 for the i3 M93p now it's more like £100.

My next build is going bigger not smaller as I'm actually swapping an m93 for a optiplex 5040 SFF. I want to use GPU passthrough because this thing sits directly under my TV.

A few more pennies on electricity but more versatility and I can cut out another pc entirely that is used for TV.

Also did this guy say half way through the video some of these are used for DOS, at the point I lost interest with his rambling.

[u/pratherdude]

What are some good micro/mini/usff goes to look for that will support dual NICs?

[u/waywardelectron]

I already use some of these at home and was super excited to see that article, but then I was utterly disappointed. IMNSHO, it's not up to the usual quality that STH points out. It amounts to one page of "these are things that exist and look, you can install $x on them".

Where are the power usage stats? The performance stats? Etc? STH really phoned this one in, unfortunately, and it's really only useful if a person has never heard of these before, and then barely.

[u/rokr1292]

These USFF computers are great for so many things

I have a ThinkCentre M93p as an HTPC/DVD player right now, (also clone hero) and it's damn tempting to pick up some more

[u/forge44]

Sigh. Couldn't afford any, and now they won't be available either.