Are my hardware components listed here compatible with running proxmox?

[KingTChoka]

Hi All, so I just bought a bunch of computer pieces, and before I open them up (making them non-refundable) I just wanted to double check here if anyone sees any potential problems with the components.

CPU	AMD Ryzen 7 5700G 8-core/16-thread
RAM	TEAM T-Force DARK Za 32GB (2 x16GB) DDR4 3600MHz
HDD	Seagate BarraCuda 2TB SATA 3.5" 7200RPM HDD
SSD	Samsung 970 Evo Plus M.2 1TB SSD
Power Supply	CORSAIR RM Series RM750 80 PLUS Gold Fully Modular ATX Power Supply
Motherboard	GIGABYTE B550 AORUS ELITE AX v2 Gaming Motherboard WIFI6

My main concern is the motherboard. I know it's designed for 'gaming', but would it have any problems with Proxmox?

Thanks!

 

[FingerlessGloves]

That'll run Proxmox for sure, just make sure you turn on AMD's virtualisation feature in the bios/uefi, I've had a few systems where its off by default.

I recommend you try get dual NVMe drives and then you can mirror them for boot, so if your SSD dies you hopefully won't loose any data. Consumer SSDs don't have the same write endurance as Data Center drives. Then backup on to the 2TB disk.

ZFS/RAID is not a backup is redundancy/pooling.

 

[KingTChoka]

Thanks for the feedback! I was planning on using the SSD as the main host, and the HDD where all the VM backups would be put. In case the SSD fails, my plan is to do a fresh-install of proxmox on it, and recover the VM's and their data from the HDD. Is this still a reliable strategy? (Also because I don't know how to set up RAID)

 

[FingerlessGloves]

That strategy is perfectly fine, just means more downtime as all. I assume its a personal setup so you'll be fine.

Don't forget to monitor yours disks with smartctl or something, so you get alerted hopefully before they fail.

EDIT: if you setup your install using ZFS with a single drive, I believe you can add the second NVMe at a later date if you so wish.

 

[KingTChoka]

That strategy is perfectly fine, just means more downtime as all. I assume its a personal setup so you'll be fine.

Don't forget to monitor yours disks with smartctl or something, so you get alerted hopefully before they fail.

EDIT: if you setup your install using ZFS with a single drive, I believe you can add the second NVMe at a later date if you so wish.

Yeah it's for home application usages, like Nextcloud, Plex movie server etc. So a little downtime should be fine with me.

Also thanks for the tip on 'smartctl', never heard of it but definitely something I'll look into!

 

[FingerlessGloves]

Yeah it's for home application usages, like Nextcloud, Plex movie server etc. So a little downtime should be fine with me.

Also thanks for the tip on 'smartctl', never heard of it but definitely something I'll look into!

You'll also want to amend the default postfix configuration so Proxmox can send emails, you'll want to create a GMAIL account or something to send as. Otherwise email delivery probably won't work.

Guide: https://www.vayelan.org/proxmoxpostfix/

Create a gmail account called like mycrazyserver@gmail.com.


Most things out the box work, but somethings require a tweak as always.

 

[Dunuin]

I wouldn't use ZFS with consumer hardware. I would atleast have chosen ECC RAM and enterprise grade SSDs if you want a reliable homeserver.
Atleast my Gigabyte Aorus x570 Pro is working fine with an Ryzen 5800X and 32GB ECC 3200MHZ RAM. ECC doesn't cost that much more, so I would always go with ECC. Especially after I lost TBs of data because three times my non-ECC RAM died slowly curruption data over weeks without me noticing it.

With your hardware I would just go with LVM-thin because of the way lower write amplification.

In general gaming stuff isn't great for building servers, except if you just want to host some game servers that can greatly benefit of the very high CPU clock. Otherwise it might be cheaper and better to just buy some refurbished servers.

 

[KingTChoka]

With your hardware I would just go with LVM-thin because of the way lower write amplification.

With non-ECC Ram, would LVM-thin prevent a system wide fs corruption like zfs (I'm assuming LVM-thin is based on ext4?) ? I had to go with non-ECC Ram because the price for the Ryzen 5700G was only $30 more, than say a 5600x, but if I went with the 5600x, the only cheap dGPU I could find are atleast $80'ish more on Amazon.

Also, since I've never built a home-lab server before, I've read mixed reviews about ECC Ram etc. With non-ECC, would just an ext4 fs be a safe and reliable bet?

If I were to instead switch with the 5600x, would a ram like this (Timetec Hynix IC 16GB DDR4 2666MHz PC4-21300 Unbuffered ECC 1.2V CL19 2Rx8 Dual Rank 288 Pin UDIMM Server Memory RAM Module Upgrade (16GB) )work?

In general gaming stuff isn't great for building servers, except if you just want to host some game servers that can greatly benefit of the very high CPU clock. Otherwise it might be cheaper and better to just buy some refurbished servers.

Yeah, I also hope to be able to create a gaming VM in the future also.

 

[Dunuin]

With non-ECC Ram, would LVM-thin prevent a system wide fs corruption like zfs (I'm assuming LVM-thin is based on ext4?) ? I had to go with non-ECC Ram because the price for the Ryzen 5700G was only $30 more, than say a 5600x, but if I went with the 5600x, the only cheap dGPU I could find are atleast $80'ish more on Amazon.

Also, since I've never built a home-lab server before, I've read mixed reviews about ECC Ram etc. With non-ECC, would just an ext4 fs be a safe and reliable bet?

If I were to instead switch with the 5600x, would a ram like this (Timetec Hynix IC 16GB DDR4 2666MHz PC4-21300 Unbuffered ECC 1.2V CL19 2Rx8 Dual Rank 288 Pin UDIMM Server Memory RAM Module Upgrade (16GB) )work?

Yeah, I also hope to be able to create a gaming VM in the future also.

ECC isn't only there so that your fs wont corrupt. It will make the server more stable in general. For every professional usecase you basically want ECC RAM.

Lets say you want to buy a pocket calculator. For a consumer it would be totally fine if every billionst calculation would be wrong. Most likely you are not doing important stuff and it is not the end of the world if a calculation is wrong. If you are a bank and the calculation is wrong and you transfer someone 1 billion dollar instead of 1000 dollar because of a wrong calculation thats bad. Or if you are a architect and the wrong calculation will cause a bridge to collapse. Here you want to really be sure that the result of the calculation is always correct and you want to be warned if it might be wrong so you can check and redo it so nothing bad will happen.
This is basically what ECC is doing. Without ECC you can never be sure that your CPU isn't calculating garbage.
I personally would buy a pocket calculator that is a bit slower and a bit more expensive but always gives correct results instead of a cheaper and faster calculator where I can't rely on the results.
So its up to you if you want the additional data integrety or not.

Normally it isn't that bad, because wrong calculations are really rare. But if your RAM is faulty or gets old and is about to die, maybe every 100th instead of every billionst calculation will be wrong. If that is the case (like 3 times with my old pc) thats really bad because you basically corrupt every file your pc accesses without noticing it, because CPU and RAM think all calculations are right because there is no ECC that will check the results for errors.

Its like with backups. If your hardware is new and tested you might think backups will be useless because you always do them over years without actually needing them. But if something happens and your drive dies and you loose all your data you will be very angry with yourself if you didn't made backups because of the additional hardware costs for backup drives.

So with ECC your RAM will be slower, because it will need to verify each operation first to check if the results are right and this will take some additional time, but atleast you can be sure that the data isn't corrupted. I like my data to be slower but always correct instead of faster and sometimes corrupted.