Building a Raspberry Pi cluster that fits neatly into a standard server rack just got a bit more straightforward. KKSB Cases has released a set of powder-coated steel rack panels in three sizes, each designed with enough vertical clearance to accommodate the official Raspberry Pi Active Cooler and standard HATs. That clearance is a practical detail that matters for the more thermally demanding Raspberry Pi 5, which can throttle under sustained load without active cooling.
The lineup spans a 25.4 cm (10-inch) 1U panel holding two boards, a 48.3 cm (19-inch) 1U panel for five, and a 48.3 cm (19-inch) 2U panel that fits up to ten. All three are compatible with the Raspberry Pi 5, Pi 4, Pi 3, and Pi 2, along with any other single-board computer that shares the same mounting hole pattern. Each Pi mounts to its own removable tray using included hex standoffs, and the trays slide into the panel with USB and Ethernet ports facing forward for cleaner cable routing. KKSB includes 40-pin GPIO headers so HATs can be elevated above the boards when extra clearance is needed.
These are mounting panels only, so boards, power supplies, cables, and any HATs are not included. That keeps the panels simple and flexible, but it does mean density is lower than more integrated solutions like the Uptime Lab Compute Blade, which packs Raspberry Pi CM4 modules with PoE and NVMe into a much tighter footprint. KKSB's approach trades density for compatibility across multiple Pi generations and easy access to full-size USB and Ethernet ports. Detailed assembly instructions for the 19-inch 2U, 19-inch 1U, and 10-inch 1U panels are available on the KKSB website.
The software most commonly paired with a rack cluster of full-size Pi boards is k3s, the lightweight Kubernetes distribution from Rancher that ships as a single binary under 100 MB and runs natively on the arm64 Pi 5 and Pi 4. A ten-node 2U panel provides enough headroom to run a multi-node cluster with a dedicated control plane and several worker nodes, which is the configuration most community guides use as a baseline. The operating system most users reach for is Raspberry Pi OS, which moved to the Linux 6.18 LTS kernel in June 2026, bringing improved ARM optimizations and networking performance across all supported Pi generations.
The panels are available now from the KKSB store, starting at $23 (€21) for the 10-inch 1U, $43 (€39) for the 19-inch 1U, and $70 (€64) for the 19-inch 2U.
