Best Virtualization for MS-A1 + 9950X? ESXi or Proxmox?

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vb6d1bgxk

New Member
Jun 14, 2024
9
3
3
Just picked up an MS-A1 Barebone — a 9950X CPU and 96GB DDR5 are on the way. Planning to use the setup primarily as a homelab, model training and development box.
Trying to decide between ESXi and Proxmox for virtualization. Which one offers better performance, compatibility, and flexibility for this kind of use case?

Would love to hear your experiences or recommendations!
 

Phence

Member
May 16, 2024
42
31
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Best to chance the machine as they're known for intermittent issues.

But I'd go with Promox. ESXi is pretty dead these days after the Broadcom acquisition and product changes unfortunately.
 

louie1961

Active Member
May 15, 2023
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Broadcom made ESXI free again, but I don't trust them. I would go Proxmox personally, or XCPng.

PS, I hate that ECC memory support is not enabled on those Minisforum machines. That's a deal breaker for me.
 

Stephan

Well-Known Member
Apr 21, 2017
1,080
843
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Germany
Is ChatGPT correct on this?
Mostly. If you don't happen to have a 13/14th gen Intel CPU with slowly cancerous manufacturing defect, any office PC of the big 3 or big 5 OEMs is more stable. PC Engines was an outlier in that they pulled off making a stable x86 platform in a 1-person shop (Pascal Dornier, with helpers from Poland for the open source BIOS). Everyone else needs to have made such systems for 10-20 years to have the experience. There is also the issue of component selection, OEMs want, get and pay of the better selected stuff. So device will last for 5 years even under permanent 100% load like some Bitcoin miner.
 

Greg_E

Active Member
Oct 10, 2024
198
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MS-A2 has better specs, if spending this much money, I'd probably go with the newer device.

What do you need the device to do? Or I guess, how much performance do you need? For light duty you could go with an HP T740 or T755 with 64GB of ram and a decent low profile NIC and run either ESXi or XCP-ng. Not sure why you would want ESXi unless you deal with it at work. I would expect Proxmox to run fine as well, but not tested. Again, this is for light use to teach you what you might need to apply to a production system.
IMG_20250523_104953045_HDR_sm.jpg

As you can see, I have a few HP T740. The top shelf has 3 XCP-ng in a pool, another XCP-ng, and a Debian "workstation". Next shelf down has 3 vSphere 8, and a Truenas. All save one of the T740 have dual 10gbps connections, and all have an a+e Intel i226v card installed where the wifi goes. The "workstation" currently has an Intel i350 quad port installed, it can be turned back into an OPNsense firewall when/if needed.

The old HP DL360 gen8 below are not currently in use, I wanted to reduce power draw with the mini PC.

Around the back are network switches, a Mikrotik CRS326-24s+2q+ and an old Cisco 2960s with POE+

I've since removed the plywood top and replaced with acrylic sheet to let more light in.

The keyboard tray will hopefully be replaced with an Uptyma keyboard/LCD device so I don't need to look up so high to see a monitor. Arrives today and the only thing I'm not sure about is if it comes with rack rails. Might be a quick bolt in change, might require me to look through the boxes of rails I have from work and modify something to fit.
 

bugacha

Active Member
Sep 21, 2024
449
132
43
Just picked up an MS-A1 Barebone — a 9950X CPU and 96GB DDR5 are on the way. Planning to use the setup primarily as a homelab, model training and development box.
Trying to decide between ESXi and Proxmox for virtualization. Which one offers better performance, compatibility, and flexibility for this kind of use case?

Would love to hear your experiences or recommendations!
Proxmox of course