Home lab scale-up ARM box

Question

I'm looking to convey into my home lab an ARM box more single-image capable than my RPi 4B POE + SSDs cluster. Already have OrangePi and not looking at RPi 5.What good SBCs or used enterprise ARM servers exist that aren't running antique/unsupported Linux/*BSD distros?

dlachausse · Accepted Answer

Have you looked into an M1 or M2 Mac Mini? They are excellent performance for the money and you could either use macOS (it&rsquo;s a genuine certified BSD-flavored UNIX) or Asahi Linux. They also appear to support OpenBSD and NetBSD, although I&rsquo;m not sure how well.

3np · Answer

https://www.servethehome.com/asrock-rack-altrad8ud-1l2t-revi...This board + 64c CPU bundle is 1.5k on Newegg. With PCIe4 you're in a different league IO-wise vs any Pi-style SBC.

moondev · Answer

You may find some of these interesting. I believe they all run ESXi arm edition so you can easily launch vms from any aarch64 uefi iso
https://www.ipi.wiki/products/com-hpc-ampere-altra
https://shop.solid-run.com/product/SRLX216S00D00GE064H09CH/
Nvidia Jetson AGX ( wow the prices went insane on these, got mine for 1k years ago )
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/windows-dev-kit-2023

ecesena · Answer

I didn't look in details, but I saw that BananaPi has a 32GB RAM version now. Less than $350 on amazon.

Home lab scale-up ARM box < $1.5k USD?

I'm looking to convey into my home lab an ARM box more single-image capable than my RPi 4B POE + SSDs cluster. Already have OrangePi and not looking at RPi 5.
What good SBCs or used enterprise ARM servers exist that aren't running antique/unsupported Linux/*BSD distros?

Have you looked into an M1 or M2 Mac Mini? They are excellent performance for the money and you could either use macOS (it’s a genuine certified BSD-flavored UNIX) or Asahi Linux. They also appear to support OpenBSD and NetBSD, although I’m not sure how well.

https://www.servethehome.com/asrock-rack-altrad8ud-1l2t-revi...
This board + 64c CPU bundle is 1.5k on Newegg. With PCIe4 you're in a different league IO-wise vs any Pi-style SBC.

I didn't look in details, but I saw that BananaPi has a 32GB RAM version now. Less than $350 on amazon.