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 I 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 aftermarket 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, 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 the EVE-NG Website.

Cluster

EVE-NG Pro allows clustering — you can have one lab and it runs 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 of memory and more CPU cores.

Due to these requirements I purchased another Lenovo ThinkCentre M70q Gen 5 with an i7-14700T. Again I picked the lowest specs other than CPU, as I purchased aftermarket 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 had to re-install EVE-NG and get the cluster working. The support from EVE-NG was great but the documentation on cluster setup could use some work.

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