Proxmox learning build out of mostly used stuff .

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

Klee

Well-Known Member
Jun 2, 2016
1,289
396
83
This build is CHEAP, only spent $109.00 so far on new parts and have everything else already on hand from other projects and builds.

Motherboard: AsrockRack EP2C602-4L/D16
Cpu's: Xeon E5-2620 V1 x2 currently mounted but plan to swap to two E5-2660's.
Case: Rosewill RSV-L4500.... only new part in the build. Yay this motherboard finally has a server case.
Hard Drives- WD 250 GB sata x12......yes they are regular consumer hard drives that are 9 years old so give me a break they were $4.00 each shipped last year. LOL
Power supply: EVGA 750
Ram: Hynix DDR3 64 gigs ..... I may throw some more in there if needed.
Video card: Nvidia GTX 650 for now because it much much better than the onboard video.
Chassis Fan's: Intake oem Rosewill 120mm x3 molex connector, Middle fans Artic Cooling 120mm pwm 4 wire, exhaust fans 80mm? Artic Cooling three wire fans.
CPU coolers: Artic Cooling Freezer i11's, rated for 150 watts and were cheap and fit the case.

Objective: To teach me about Proxmox, will be running VM's to be decided.

Will run Raidz0 on all 12 drives so it should be pretty speedy, not worried about data so If I screw something up it wont be a big deal.

NOT a mission critical server, its just a learning/play build.

All the drives have zero errors, I don't remember the smart data since its been months since I tested them but they all seem to be in great shape.

I plan on running zfs on all drives in Raidz0......YES RAIDZ ZERO!!!... been wanting to have lots of drives running raid0 for a long time and this will be fun to run it on 12 hard drives just to see what it will do.

3 TB's of raid0 goodness or heartache depending on how you look at it.

I'm not done with the assembly yet and still need to swap out the E5-2620's for the 2660's

Also might throw a Intel 120 gig SSD in there.

I swapped the 5 Rosewill fans out because the motherboard has a bunch of four and three pin fan headers and I already had the pwm fans.

Subject to change at anytime depending on my mood and/or aggravation level. :p

Oh and the AsrockRack EP2C602-4L/D16 is a really GREAT board.





 
Last edited:

Klee

Well-Known Member
Jun 2, 2016
1,289
396
83
Fully wired up, only need to swap out the cpu's.

I'll finish up in the am and boot it up into the bios to configure whatever I need to then install proxmox.
 

Klee

Well-Known Member
Jun 2, 2016
1,289
396
83
Booted into the bios and all 12 drives are detected.

Still need to swap cpu's.

Also at idle in the bios it shows 64 watts on my kilowatt meter.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Evan and Patrick

Evan

Well-Known Member
Jan 6, 2016
3,346
598
113
Booted into the bios and all 12 drives are detected.

Still need to swap cpu's.

Also at idle in the bios it shows 64 watts on my kilowatt meter.
Only 64 watts ? Surprisingly low for that. I am sure your not unhappy !
 

Klee

Well-Known Member
Jun 2, 2016
1,289
396
83
Only 64 watts ? Surprisingly low for that. I am sure your not unhappy !

It's lower than I was expecting, but that is just in the bios with no OS and the drives were not being accessed.

EDIT: That 64 watts might not be correct, the kilowatt meter i'm using is acting flaky so the next time i'll shutdown i'll plug in my other one.
 
Last edited:

Klee

Well-Known Member
Jun 2, 2016
1,289
396
83
Swapped cpu's. And just started to download the latest release of Proxmox

 

Klee

Well-Known Member
Jun 2, 2016
1,289
396
83
Installing my first vm, Ubuntu 16.04.4 desktop, hardest part so far was finding the directory to copy the iso into.

Pretty speedy install.
 

Klee

Well-Known Member
Jun 2, 2016
1,289
396
83
Spice seems to have the best performance for a video "driver" but I cant change the resolution, it locks the vm up when I try.

Also tried "VM compatable", it lets me resize the desktop but the performance is not too great.

Thats in a Ubuntu VM.

Edit: I had to downgrad the kernel in the Ubuntu vm from 4.13 to 4.4 and that works.

I find the performance in the VM almost as good as the Ubuntu desktop that I am logged in from.

From the Proxmox bios splash it takes ten seconds to the login screen in the VM.

Much faster than a local install on a single spinning hard drive. Sweet!

Gave the Ubuntu 16.04.4 VM 6 cpu cores and 8 gig's of ram.

I gave it more than I could have but I can easily lower the specs if needed.

Now on to some kind of Windows vm install.
 
Last edited:

Klee

Well-Known Member
Jun 2, 2016
1,289
396
83
Did a quick test, quite a few cryptocoin daemons have issues if you try to run from a regular hard drive instead of a ssd.

Downloaded and compiled worktips , that one had had issues running on a regular hard drive, it is running and downloading the blockchain without any issues.
 

Klee

Well-Known Member
Jun 2, 2016
1,289
396
83
Seems to be doing just fine so far.

"root@pve:~# zpool status -v rpool
pool: rpool
state: ONLINE
scan: scrub repaired 0B in 0h1m with 0 errors on Mon Jun 18 18:36:07 2018
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
rpool ONLINE 0 0 0
sda2 ONLINE 0 0 0
sdb ONLINE 0 0 0
sdc ONLINE 0 0 0
sdd ONLINE 0 0 0
sde ONLINE 0 0 0
sdf ONLINE 0 0 0
sdg ONLINE 0 0 0
sdh ONLINE 0 0 0
sdi ONLINE 0 0 0
sdj ONLINE 0 0 0
sdk ONLINE 0 0 0
sdl ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors"
 

Klee

Well-Known Member
Jun 2, 2016
1,289
396
83
I had a power outage this morning after I left for work here at the house, nope no UPS , and the proxmox server handled it with zero issues.

Raid0 on old hardware with no automatic backup configured and no UPS...............what could go wrong? :p
 

Klee

Well-Known Member
Jun 2, 2016
1,289
396
83
Dug out some old install cd's to install, plus it gives me the motivation to make backup iso's for them.

First to try out is Windows 2000 Advanced Server, works fine so far.

If your wondering why Win 2000 its because I also play around with old pc's and its easier to run an older version of Win server to connect to on older windows.

Next up WinXP 64 bit, then 2003 server and then 2008r2.
 
Last edited:

Tha_14

Server Newbie
Mar 9, 2017
72
10
8
Nice build. I am also looking to start learning how to setup and use proxmox. Keep us updated. :)
 

Klee

Well-Known Member
Jun 2, 2016
1,289
396
83
Powered down and removed the GTX 650 video card and gpu cable. Still running fine, haven't really done much except installed a few o.s.'s and played with those a bit.

Also removed the case front door/filter because it actually runs quieter without it, plus it looks nicer.
 

Klee

Well-Known Member
Jun 2, 2016
1,289
396
83
First simple test on the ProxMox build:

root@pve:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/output conv=fdatasync bs=384k count=1k; rm -f /tmp/output
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
402653184 bytes (403 MB, 384 MiB) copied, 0.295494 s, 1.4 GB/s


Compared to my desktop I am currently using that has a Samsung 500 gb ssd , 950 evo.

@LinuxBeast:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/output conv=fdatasync bs=384k count=1k; rm -f /tmp/output
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
402653184 bytes (403 MB, 384 MiB) copied, 1.19086 s, 338 MB/s

Its ALOT faster than my consumer ssd. LOL.

More testing......
 
Last edited:

Klee

Well-Known Member
Jun 2, 2016
1,289
396
83
Another quick test, disk performance from within a VM.

Windows XP Pro 64bit configured with 8 core's , 4 gig's of ram and one 50 gb drive.

Drive is configured as ide and went with all the defaults.