Thoughts on the Lenovo ThinkCenter m920q for virtualization and low noise/power?

[Ron Kelley]

Greetings all,

I am looking for a small (portable), quiet, and low-power PC to run VMWare ESXi. I run a bunch of VMs to develop DevOps code and need a PC with 6-8 CPUs, 64G RAM, and NVMe support. My virtualization tool of choice is VMWare, but I could do Proxmox or XCP-NG as well. I have a bunch of "big iron" hardware today but really don't want to spin up a big server (eg: 24-core, 256G RAM) just to run a few VMs. Not only do I hate the noise of the big server, I would like this PC to be on all the time (24x7).

I keep looking at the TinyMiniMicro threads and my head is spinning from all the choices. I think my best choice would be a Lenovo ThinkCentre M920q with either the i7-8700T or i9-9900T processor. Multiple NICs are nice but not required.

Any thoughts on the M920q device for running VMWare ESXi (6.7, 7.x, or 8.x)? Given this box is a few years old, is there a more recent/better unit I should consider?


Thanks!

 

[zer0sum]

Works perfectly and if you opt for the m720 or m920 they can be very cheap

If you have a little more budget then an m90q is your best bet as it has much newer 10 or 11 gen cpu's and also an extra nvme slot.

Both of them can take a half height PCIe card so you can run either a quad 1G or dual 10G card

 

[Ron Kelley]

Awesome, thanks for the reply! I will look at the m90q and see if I can get a good deal on the secondary market...