[lustre-discuss] Hardware advice for homelab

[Andrew Elwell]

Hi folks,

Given my homelab testing for Lustre tends to be contained within
VirtualBox on laptop ($work has a physical hardware test bed once
mucking around gets serious), I'm considering expanding to some real
hardware at home for testing. My MythTV days are over, but I'd ideally
like an aarch64 client that can run on a Raspberry Pi, incase I ever
poke at Kodi.

What server hardware would people advise that fulfils:

* low running cost (it's my electricity bill!)
* fairly cheap to buy (own budget)
* if I'm buying a cased 'nuc' type thing, it must be able to fit in a
3.5" SATA drive (as I have some old ones that fell off the back of a
rack)
* not full of screaming fans

Given it's not planned for production use 24/7 I don't care about HA
with multi-tailed drives, but would quite like the ability to add more
OSSs as required.
Cable sprawl / mounting isn't that much of an issue, providing it can
live in the shed

Any suggestions?

Andrew