The Pi 5 as a mini server
A sysadmin’s perspective on setting up and running a new Raspberry Pi 5 for Docker and beyond.
Iwas graciously loaned a Pi 5 8GB version to trial. Many reviews have been written about the Pi 5 as a new iteration of dual-screencapable SBC desktops, but as a sysadmin, I was more interested in using it in a server context. The low power aspect appeals greatly. The verdict? It’s pretty good.
The new generation of Pi is unlike the Pis of the old. Unfortunately, that fact is reflected in the pricing. It is essentially the ‘Premium’ Pi experience. The price increases further when you start to feed in the cost of the peripherals – the essential heatsink and the power supply. The new official power supply can provide 20 watts – far more than previous generations. This is partly to feed the increased CPU power consumption and partly to be more stable when adding external devices via the USB 3 ports. There is no longer onboard sound or standard HDMI. This means buying one or two of the appropriate micro HDMI to full HDMI convertors if looking to use it as a desktop.
Other nice additions include (finally) a power button and the ability to add a real, honest-to-goodness hardware clock via the addition of an (at cost) battery.
From a sysadmin point of view, if you want it as a headless server, it is simple enough to configure when flashing a new micro USB using the official Raspberry Imager tool. The imager options allow for the configuration of IP and SSH ahead of time (it allows you to set the Wi-Fi details and SSH service autostart). These options are available after you have selected your device and it prompts: Would you like to apply OS customisation settings? Set this up and then apply the config. Once the Pi is booted up, you should be able to SSH straight into the server.
A little tip is that if you use the Raspberry Pi as a desktop, using a mouse and keyboard set that is preconfigured to use a shared USB receiver (such as
Logi Bolt) means that the mouse and keyboard only consume one of the precious USB slots.
A major limitation of previous Pis was memory. After a few programs were loaded, the memory could become constrained. The recent chip-supply shortages have now been resolved with the availability of SKUs that have more memory onboard.
Feel the heat
A pro tip for putting it together, is when adding the heatsink, connect the fan wires first because doing it is fiddly and finger-cut-inducing. The heatsink is cleverly designed to use plastic lugs to secure it in place and can only be applied one way: the right way.
As to the server capabilities, we were quickly able to configure it to run six different Docker images and still have plenty of RAM left. The performance is good enough that it can run substantial containers, such as Invidious, Jellyfin, Sonarr and others, without any issues. A word of caution, though: while it may make a great media server and has plenty of resources, it will not go above 1080p without frame drop.
With 20W available, powering small external disks seemed to be less of an issue. There were no stability issues or dropped connectivity under significant load. Even when using encrypted volumes on external USB 3 disks, the performance was good.
If the need is for a low-power but reasonably performant ‘box in the corner’ to run lightweight tasks or as a media server or Docker host, it works very well. That said, for the same price as the board, power supply and adaptor, I was able to get a second user SFF M900 desktop that was equally performant but more of a whole package; it depends what you want to do.
It is undeniable that the Pi changed the ARM landscape and is without doubt the leader, but it is now straddling a complex cavern – on one side tinkerers, on the other people who want to do more serious things and push the ARM envelope. I think some of the new add-ons may be game-changers, including the much awaited hardware add-on to allow NVMe disks.