The Cruiser and the Mini Rack: One Board to Run It All

A typical home lab rack is two devices doing a job one device could do. The Exaviz Cruiser removes the layer where you need a separate switch.
By Exaviz Team |
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  2 minute read  

A typical home lab rack looks something like this:

A Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant. A PoE switch next to it to power everything else. Two power supplies. A handful of cables. It works, but it’s two devices doing a job one device could do.

The Exaviz Cruiser flips that around. The PoE switch is built into the board. You get 8 ports of PoE+ (expandable to 16), a CM5 running your stack, NVMe storage, and 2.5GbE WAN, all in one Mini-ITX form factor. There is no separate switch.

That means your PoE ports are free to do something useful:

  • A Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole for network-wide ad blocking
  • A JetKVM for remote keyboard/video/mouse access to other machines in the rack
  • An ADS-B SDR receiver for aircraft tracking
  • A PoE-powered GL-iNet router as a dedicated VPN gateway
  • A second Pi as a Docker or Kubernetes worker node

Every one of those devices draws well under 15W. Standard 802.3af. The Cruiser’s ports support up to 30W each, so you have headroom to spare. One cable per device, power and data together. No power bricks, no outlet hunting.

And for this kind of build, you can run the whole thing off our 48V 4A PSU. One small power brick, 192W of budget, powering the Cruiser and every device hanging off it. That’s your entire rack on a single supply.

The mini rack community has been building toward this kind of setup for years. The Cruiser just removes the layer where you need a separate switch to make it work.

Full specs and pre-order at exaviz.com. Documentation at exa-pedia.com.

(Photo Courtesy of Jeff Geerling)

Last modified March 4, 2026