Virtual Oxide Labs: Emulating a Full Oxide Rack

Virtual Oxide Labs: Emulating a Full Oxide Rack(oxide.computer)

72 points by tosh 7 hours ago | 7 comments

pbnjay 47 minutes ago |

Fun to see the emulation heading up the stack, I wish my employer could afford some real oxide racks!

About 4 months ago, I booted helios + omicron on bare metal on a server in my homelab (following the YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwXtS0-r1uQ). Performance wasn't great on my old hardware (32cores, dual Xeon 2.6ghz, 256gb DDR4), and it used like 30% CPU while idle, but it was fun poking around and playing with the software while I could.

qchris 2 hours ago |

> When I joined Oxide last year, one of the first things I was introduced to was our racklettes; that is, smaller than average racks of four sleds and two switches each. These racklettes can be initialized and run just like a real rack, precisely because they are a real rack. Just not in any form factor it would be economical to sell.

Probably shouldn't have mentioned this publicly ;) Every time an Oxide post comes up, there's people in the comments expressing fervent wishes for just this sort of thing. Now that they know it exists, I imagine the the voices asking to make it available for developers and homelabs will grow even louder.

stevekaram 1 hour ago | |

Ha! Even a racklette might be a smidge too big for the homelab. But you know, given these Voxel 'sleds' are ~6GB RAM each, we could probably get a solid mini-PC farm going now....

swherdman 4 hours ago |

If you just want to try emulating the virtualization stack i build this about 6-9 months ago https://github.com/swherdman/whoah-cli

Steps to build if you prefer it manually: https://swherdman.com/blog/We-Have-Oxide-at-Home-P1/ https://swherdman.com/blog/We-Have-Oxide-at-Home-P2/

aliasxneo 3 hours ago | |

Just out of curiosity, did you do this for the kick of it or did you find the stack to actually be nice to use? Not that it takes much to convince me to nuke my homelab for the 10th time, but given the nature of Oxide, I'd assume they are running pretty reliable software (very willing to be wrong here).

stevekaram 3 hours ago | | |

I don't want to speak for swherdman, but I don't know that you'd want to nuke anything just to use this. If you want to learn about the Oxide stack, go for it and it'll be a great teacher. But if you're just looking for a better way to run your homelab, I don't know that this would be it.

Of course, I say this as someone running a Nucleo STM32H753ZI board with Hubris as an SP for my home NAS....

stevekaram 3 hours ago | |

Hey that's really interesting, thanks for the share! It looks like this is using the standalone Omicron build, but on a Proxmox VM, right? Great stuff for running the CP in easy mode!