New proxmox ve4 node

[bankai]

Hello everyone,

New to the forum, very interesting discussions and great articles on STH! Glad to be here!

I am looking into adding an additional node to my proxmox cluster. My primary goal is not much noise, and lowest possible power usage vs crunch-power.

At the moment I am running 2 Supermicro 2750 Mini-ITX boards in M350 cases and they run really fine. (They just lack the CPU punch sometimes...)

My build below is what I am planning to build together, however I have some concerns about cooling. Also I am hesitant between 2x32GB ECC RDIMM modules or 4x16GB ECC RDIMM.

The 16GB's are available locally, whereas the 32's are not easy to find. Also, normally any DDR4 ECC RDIMM should work right? Even if it has not been tested by Supermicro?

Build’s Name: PowBox!
Operating System/ Storage Platform: Proxmox VE 4
CPU: Xeon D-1540
Motherboard: Supermicro X10SDV-8C-TLN4F (fanless version)
Cooling: NOCTUA NF-A6x25 FLX on top of CPU
Chassis: M350 Mini-ITX
Drives: 1x Kingston 60GB V300 SSD
RAM: 4x16GB (Or 2x32GB for future)
Add-in Cards: None planned so far
Power Supply: PicoPSU 160XT
Other Bits: Data stored on Synology 415+, access per NFS.

Usage Profile: VM's, mostly webservices, but also a few Java apps, and SQL.

What do you think, will that work out? Or will it overheat? I know case is very (too?) compact, but that's what I like...

Thank a lot for your read/help.
Bankai

 

[Patrick]

A few thoughts/ questions:

• Is your plan to just use Velcro or something to mount the fan above the passive heatsink? You may have to play with positioning. You will also need to get to the 10Gb PHY. Some airflow as it does get hot.
• I might get a slightly different boot drive. Even a used S3500 120GB would be an improvement. Here is an example for $45: [2146B] SSDSC2BB120G4_Intel DC S3500 Series 120GB SATA 2.5" SSD if you wanted to go slightly bigger 160GB is $60: Intel SSD DC S3500 Series 160GB 2.5" 6Gb/s SSDSC2BB160G4 Solid State Drive
  Proxmox writes logs to the boot drive. I lost three machines worth of Kingston V200 240GB drives in different machines within 72 hours during Ceph cluster burn-in. The writes are not a lot but I now just use enterprise drives that can handle consistent workloads. Also, I use the boot drive on my nodes for scratch space to import/ convert VMs, download ISOs and etc.
• You could probably get away with a slightly less power but with the price of the PicoPSUs I might just keep the one you have.
• I like that case, but just want to throw a suggestion in for: LIAN LI Mini-Q ITX TOWER PC CASE PC-Q07 (Small Form Factor) which I use in a home non-10Gbase-T Xeon D Proxmox node. You have more room for a 120mm fan if you wanted to zip tie mount or something. You also can install a 4-in-1/ 6-in-1 hot swap bay in the event you wanted to get WD Red 1TB drives/ SSDs and have local ZFS. Finally, you can actually fit an expansion card in there. For example, I have an Intel X520-da2 in the slot of mine. It is a bigger case but is not that bad looking and still somewhat compact.

 

[bankai]

Thank you for your reply/help Patrick!

• Yes, indeed, I intend to mount the fan directly on top of the passive heatsink. I've seen that workout quite well already in some pictures. For the 10Gb PHY, I won't use them yet I believe. At a later stage I may though. Do you mean that they heat up even when not used?

• Thanks for the hint about Enterprise storage. I will only have the OS on it, and all data will be read/writen over 2x1Gb LACP for now. So no CEPH "yet". Do you recommend it? Because for now I just have normal shared NFS storage for all my nodes.

• You think that the picopsu 150XT would suffice? Or even lower, like 120?

• I see, I understand your though about this. Gives more space for cooling, more expandability options. Just takes more space. Do you know any case, by chance, that would be beetween those two in size? I ask this because I like the idea of being able to just put it in a backpack like a book

PS: Your home node you wrote about, does it get warm when you put some punch on it?

Again, thank you a lot for your help! Much appreciated!

 

[Patrick]

I think you can disable the NIC but I would just give it some airflow. It does not need a dedicated fan or anything, I just would not want it to be in an airflow dead spot.

No Ceph is fine, just if I were buying a new drive for this, I would probably pick up one of those S3500's over the Kingston drive.

The 150XT would be fine, and 120 would likely be also. Then again, I used to buy lower-rated ones now I just buy higher-end PicoPSUs because I dislike adding components later then needing to upgrade the PSU.

I wish I did! No idea though.