[injinj]

I've been running frr (free range routing) for networking, using ospf layer 3 routing between my hosts. This allows dynamic routes to be populated throughout and makes a switched layer 2 network optional, since switches tend to be expensive and obnoxiously loud and a star topology is not necessary with a layer 3 network.

I like the Supermicro Xeon D boards because I can power 6 of them off a single power supply (the GPU cables can be converted to a 4 pin cpu).

I also use systemd-nspawn (w/ dnf --installroot or debootstrap) or docker to attach instances to the network, where each has it's own layer 3 address distributed by frr.