Virtual Oxide Labs: Emulating a Full Oxide Rack

swherdman

If you just want to try emulating the virtualization stack i build this about 6-9 months ago https://github.com/swherdman/whoah-cli Steps to build if you prefer it manually: https://swherdman.com/blog/We-Have-Oxide-at-Home-P1/ https://swherdman.com/blog/We-Have-Oxide-at-Home-P2/

qchris

> When I joined Oxide last year, one of the first things I was introduced to was our racklettes; that is, smaller than average racks of four sleds and two switches each. These racklettes can be initialized and run just like a real rack, precisely because they are a real rack. Just not in any form factor it would be economical to sell. Probably shouldn't have mentioned this publicly ;) Every time an Oxide post comes up, there's people in the comments expressing fervent wishes for just this sort of thing. Now that they know it exists, I imagine the the voices asking to make it available for developers and homelabs will grow even louder.

pbnjay

Fun to see the emulation heading up the stack, I wish my employer could afford some real oxide racks! About 4 months ago, I booted helios + omicron on bare metal on a server in my homelab (following the YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwXtS0-r1uQ ). Performance wasn't great on my old hardware (32cores, dual Xeon 2.6ghz, 256gb DDR4), and it used like 30% CPU while idle, but it was fun poking around and playing with the software while I could.

happyPersonR

Like 3/4 of my career was building stuff like this along with the software that ran in it for basically this exact use case. We even had it integrated into our CI. Spent upwards of a decade building things like this. One thing we realized was that we needed to be able to simulate upgrades like this. Lead to a lot of complexity but it was worth it. This testing was some of the most valuable and because we had it automated it really let us build better things faster and find issues and regressions and verify new functionality :)