Low Budget Proxmox Server

[luck3rhoch3]

Hello,

i need to set up a low budget server for a friend.

He does not want to pay for enterprise hardware but i think proxmox would still be a good solution for him in terms of availability.

It needs to run three services with databases, two on linux, one on windows.

I only have an 1.500 € budget for hardware so this would be my idea:

- consumer mainboard Intel or AMD with 6 SATA ports and a decent CPU and ECC Support
- 32 GB ECC RAM
- 2x Kingston DC600M 480 GB with ZFS mirror for the Proxmox host
- 3x Kingston DC600M 960 GB for the VMs in a RAIDZ1

This is the cheapest SSD with PLP i found. Speed of the SATA SSD is more than enough. His old server runs on HDDs only and performance was never a problem.

He knows that it's not the best idea to run a 24/7 server on consumer hardware but he does this since an eternety and was always lucky.

Daily Backups will be saved on a QNAP NAS daily and on an online storage once a week.

Do you have any criticism or tips for me? (and yes i know, consumer hardware is not a good idea for a server which is running 24/7).

Thank you very much.

 

[uzumo]

Older CPUs can severely degrade disk and RAM speeds, so we recommend using a newer CPU.
*The performance of the Xeon E5 2699 v4 was terrible.

A Core Ultra 235 or higher, or an AM5 Ryzen should be fine.

 

[alexskysilk]

The performance of the Xeon E5 2699 v4 was terrible.

In what sense? the only real "issue" with this generation of cpu is their atrocious performance/watt, not performance in general. Intel's product portfolio is available tall (core speed) and wide (core count) to suit a wide variety of need.

More to the point, size the hardware to the application, not arbitrarily. @luck3rhoch3 I hope you realize the e1500 is actually a substantial amount of money and there are other things you should take into consideration, namely:

1. do you have a power budget? power means direct cost of operation as well as heat generated.
2. do you have environmental restrictions (eg, space, light, noise)
3. you dont need 480gb drives for your os. any drives will do, and will not really impact performance since all they are being used for is to load the OS and record logs. Many people talk about plp this and enterprise that, but there is very little benefit for OS drives.
4. Depending on your answers for 1 and 2, dont be so quick to discount used/decommissioned enterprise gear. a Dell R640 would come well in your pricerange and would be superior for server use to anything you can build on your own.