Suggestion: Proxmox VE Homelab

[PhillyBilly]

Hi fellow builders!

I'm looking into fiddeling together a homeserver with Proxmox VE, to run 2 or 3 linux VMs/containers for testing purposes (playing with pi-hole, pfsense etc.) plus maybe a dedicated linux server to play some "Valheim" or "CS:GO" with 4 or 5 friends. Something to play around, you know? No NAS, no HA or anything enterprise grade is needed.

I still own this huge server-box i built with 2 x XEON E5-2670 cpu's on an intel C6xx server board, 64 GB RAM and 750 watts psu, but i guess that is too much for a little testing and have that thing run 24/7 just to host a game from time to time. Guess this setup will eat more juice than necessary for this use case(?)...
One of them low-power micro-pcs with 2 core low power CPUs would surely handle pi-hole and other linux testing just fine, on the other hand don't seem to have enough CPU-Power for the game hosting or even the game hosting _and_ some other VMs at the same time.

I am not sure, which direction to shoot CPU/board-wise. Do you have any suggestions, what i should get to have enough CPU-power for 3-4 parallel VMs (with on of them beeing a game server) and is still efficient enough to run 24/7, possibly at a low noise level? Or should i just fire up that XEON E5-beast and try to get it to not eat all the juice (somehow)? I had an eye on a Lenovo ThinkServer TS140 with XEON E3-122x CPU. That looked quite like something "in between", that could do the job. But i did not buy it yet, because i wasn't sure if it makes sense...

 

[PhillyBilly]

Followup: Found an intel NUC NUC5i3MYBE i3 2,1GHZ 4GB RAM 120GB SSD passive cooling (metal case). I'll add another 4 GB of RAM and will see, how well it will perform for the few things, i intend to run on it. I'll let you know, how it went when the box has arrived and i got the time to install Proxmox VE and the first gaming server container.

Any other suggestions on (price/energy) efficient solutions with a bit of compute power are welcome.

 

[pjratl]

Check out c3000 atom systems and 4c Xeon d both can be very power efficent

 

[PhillyBilly]

Hi, getting back to my post after quite some testing with "Valheim" dedicated server running on a VM in Proxmos on the NUC. Didn't go too bad. Upgraded the RAM to 16 GB and gave the VM 8 GB and 2 cores. But well, when playing with 5 players at once the cpu load reaches ~90% or a load over 1.0 pretty soon. Seems i need to shoot for a little more cpu-power. @pjratl: Will prolly have a look to get a ThinkServer with a Xeon E3-12xx cpu. That should pretty much do the job _and_ be a bit more efficient, than that other dual Xeon-E5 box i have left... Lets see, how it turns out. Will be using the NUCs for routing/firewall-purposes later on, i guess.

 

[zer0sum]

The NUC's are good, and I nearly bought a few NUC8's, but in the end I went with a Lenovo M920q.

They are really small like a NUC, but they are flatter and a bit wider, so they stack perfectly.
Max memory is the same and is 2 x 32g sodimms, and it can take 1 x NVME drive.
It supports vPRO so you have an IPMI like interface for headless configuration

The best part is though, they have an open PCIe slot, so you can do all sorts of fun stuff

• Quad port NIC, like an i350
• Mellanox CX3 for dual 10/40/56 GbE
• Nvidia Quadro for hardware transcoding
• PCIe to nvme card
• etc.

Mine has 64g ram, 1TB NVME, and a Mellanox card and it has been awesome so far

 

[unmesh]

...
The best part is though, they have an open PCIe slot, so you can do all sorts of fun stuff
...

What is your solution for the exterior facing brackets for PCIe cards?