EVE-NG Physical / Bare Metal Cluster

For my personal EVE-NG Cluster I wanted something that was low power, high spec and a small form factor. For my first node a decided on a Lenovo ThinkCentre M75q Gen 5 Tiny, I selected the Ryzen 7 CPU but left all other specs the same. It is cheaper to purchase a hard drive and memory after market and install them yourself. I purchased two 64GB DIMMs of RAM and a 4TB M.2 SATA Drive and installed them.

although this was cost effective some I had some issues with vJunos images in EVE-NG that I could not get to boot correctly.

After getting the PC I followed the guide on installing a bare metal OS from EVE-NG Website

Cluster

EVE-NG Pro allows clustering e.g you can have 1 lab and it run on multiple physical or virtual machines at the same time. I run a lot of Windows based labs with testing out virtualisation and network configs inside eve-ng. This requirement means I needed more than 64GB or memory and more CPU cores.

Due to these requirements I purchased another Lenovo ThinkCenter M70q Gen 5 with i7-14700T again I picked the lowest specs other than CPU as I purchased after market RAM and Storage.

The cluster setup process was not easy, I kept getting weird errors that were not explained, after trying many things I contacted support and it turns out that both the PCs going into the cluster need to have the same time and timezone set, after this they then had to re-install eve-ng and get the cluster working. The support from EVE-NG was great but the documentation on cluster can use some work.

Since the cluster was setup with support from EVE-NG it has worked well, althogh sometimes I manually need to push devices to specific nodes / PCs to load balance the correctly.