I'm finally free from the Intel/AMD world and running completely arm64 on Ampere CPUs
I picked up three of these 2 node engineering samples Mt. Bonnells from Ebay, they're single socket Ampere, 3 M.2 on the montherboard, OCP 3.0 and a single PCIe slot and connected to 6 U.2 NVME upfront.
Each node has a Q80-30, 80 core Ampere at 3Ghz, and 64-128GB RAM each, 500-1.5 TB NVME
The Mt. Collins below started it all and each has a 3090, Dual Q80-30 and 128GB RAM and 2TBs of NVME between the front and M.2
Most of the nodes have single 40GB port to my Arista's but im converting them to 4x25Gb (100GB is in my future with NVMEof from my NAS)okay
It's all a baremetal K8s cluster running on Talos with Omni (also running on arm64 OrangePi)
Since I think hardware is only the half of what r/homelab, what I'm running in the cluster:
- Flux via Flux Operator
- CNI / kube-proxy replacement / BGP: Cilium + Hubble
- Ingress: Gateway API Cillium integration but also Envoy Gateway
- Kyverno, Descheduler
- KEDA for autoscaling
- cert-manager (Cloudflare DNS-01)
- cloudflared for remote access to Woodpecker webhooks
- Node Feature Discovery, metrics-server, kube-state-metrics
Storage / Data
- Longhorn
- S3: SeaweedFS (+ Iceberg REST catalog) on NAS iSCSI LUNs
- Postgres: CloudNativePG + Barman Cloud plugin
- ClickHouse via the ClickHouse Operator
- Trino (KEDA-autoscaled workers)
- Dragonfly for Redis replacement/caching
- NATS + JetStream (NACK) for pipelines and automations
- zot switched from Harbor since they didn't have Arm builds
- Gitea
Misc Workflows/ML/AI Stuff
- Temporal
- Ray via KubeRay
- MLflow
- BuildKit arm64 builders (buildx kube driver)
- agent-sandbox controller
Observability
- OpenTelemetry Operator + collector/target allocator
- VictoriaMetrics (vminsert/vmselect) + VictoriaTraces
- Dual write to ClickHouse for traces/metrics (ClickStack schema) which will replace VM
AI / ML (on 2x RTX 3090, ARM64)
- [JupyterHub] (https://jupyter.org/)
- Envoy AI Gateway → Anthropic / OpenAI / OpenRouter / local models
- Open WebUI
- Gateway API Inference Extension EPP (had to build this in ARM)
- ASR: whisper.cpp with whisper-large-v3, NVIDIA Nemotron streaming ASR (NeMo)
- Diarization: NVIDIA Sortformer (NeMo)
-
audio-transcriber / audio-diarizer / audio-fusion — AES67 (Dante) DRA I (Claude) wrote to move this from my speaker setup into my cluster
-
AI-text detection stack: adaptive-classifier/ai-detector, ModernBERT-based detectors, authormist-originality, tmr-ai-text-detector
DNS
- blocky (Dragonfly-backed cache) + blocky-sync, a controller I (Claude) wrote to reconcile blocky config from CRDs
Media
https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1vx7rvf
Source: r/homelab · by /u/gscjj
