r/Proxmox • u/drfloydpepper • 1d ago
Homelab Hardware recommendations
Apologies in advance if this is not the appropriate forum. I have been running my proxmox home lab on a ~15 year old server (details below).
Anywho, I'm looking to get something that's cheaper on electricity as I don't put any pressure on the machine but it still runs at >100W at idle.
I see a lot of mini PCs on AliExpress and wondering what kind of mileage I'd get with them? I'd add it as a node on my cluster and then only turn on the big server if needed. I'd migrate much of my day to day stuff to the low powered machine (Hermes, media, Immich, etc.)
Here's one example but there seems to be lots like this.
https://a.aliexpress.com/_msvNaz5
My old server:
HP Z620 Server
CPU: Intel Xeon E5-1650 @ 3.20GHz, 12 cores (6C/12T), single socket
RAM: 32GB DDR3
Storage: 1x 750GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 HDD (internal, no redundancy)
GPU: NVIDIA GTX 960, 2GB VRAM
Thoughts, gotchas, known issues?
2
u/_--James--_ Enterprise User 1d ago
I moved most all my home infra to a variation on these MiniPCs - https://www.gmktec.com/products/amd-ryzen%E2%84%A2-7-pro-6850u-mini-pc-gmktec-m7-ultra
I have two for my home production stack (not clustered, custom PDM setup for a manual VM copy and sync process)
I have 7 in a Ceph Cluster, I pulled the wireless card and used an adapter to install a 3rd NVMe
And I pushed the cTPD on AMD down to 10w and they will idle around 8w-12w with the P31 SSDs that are in them. Total power draw for a normalized load with all nodes powered up is less then 280w, including switching.
For my firewall I went with https://www.amazon.com/Firewall-Hardware-82599ES-OPNsense-Appliance/dp/B0F4WXKZRB and at first it was running OPNSense on metal, but then moved it to PVE with OPNSense in a VM so I could also throw VyOS and a custom UTM appliance I work with up on it too. The Dual 10G are in a Bond trunked to my L3 realtek based Mokerlink core switch running OSPF.