Raspberry Pi 4 home lab with LXD cluster

Let's take 3 Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB) and assemble a home lab environment using LXD cluster. This is a very quick way to get a lab capable of running both containers and virtual machines and that can easily be managed remotely over the network from Linux, MacOS or Windows.

TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 Introduction
2:30 Setting up the initial server
5:04 Running some instances
6:49 Assembling the full cluster
9:33 Connecting to the cluster from a laptop
10:02 Running more instances
13:21 Cluster configuration options
17:14 Cluster member evacuation
22:10 Conclusion

RESOURCES:

[kurtkremitzki]

Cool, I always thought you had to create a bridge device on top of your eth0-equivalent and use that in LXD, did not know you could just use the interface directly. The power vs. ease of use of Raspberry Pi LXD clusters in a home lab situation is awesome. With the Turing Pi 2 coming soon as a clusterboard of four Raspberry Pi CM4s, I am tempted to buy one just for a dedicated LXD cluster setup instead of mingling it in amongst other Pi uses.

[bolapara]

Great stuff. I'd be interested in a video on storage pools including remote storage pools.

[jucosorin]

Hi Stephane. I finally got around to create my first rpi cluster of 3 machines, almost 9 month after I first saw this video. Thank you for the detailed information. One thing though. I used Ubuntu 22.04 server on all the rpis and by default it doesn't have the macvlan module so if one chooses the physical network bridge it will not work. I had to do 'sudo apt install linux-modules-extra-raspi' and that got me macvlan module. Maybe someone will find this useful.

[damaliamarsi]

Nice. Saved this one for reference. I do have a question. What happens if you physically lose a cluster member. Is clustering for HA or just for load balancing? Sorry if this is a stupid question.

[michaelventarola]

I am installing a 4 node cluster. The 1st node I defined a sperate disk /dev/sda, but was not given that option on Nodes 2 thru 4. How do I define the /dev/sda on them?

[BrianThomas]

How many nodes should I get? I've never done before. I was going to do 8. Is that too many?

[engshahed]

Ubuntu 20.4.3 LTS Server AArch64 RAW Image used by me. After lxd init it’s not working fine! It’s hang for any lxd/lxc command! Even I can’t remove and reinstall it. It’s not so straight forward as I did it before in my Thinkpad L14 on Intel Core-i5! This os installed by me using CloudInit. Default user was pi instead of ubuntu. Only I found that ZFS storage backend not installed by default! Beside that no more issue found by me! Would you please share with us what would be the reason for hang lxc/lxd command and how can I fix it?