Mini PC for Proxmox?

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mylesw

Renowned Member
Feb 10, 2011
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Does anyone have a recommendation for an AMD Ryzen based Mini PC that is compatible for Proxmox 6 or 7? I need something expandable to 64GB memory or more, 2TB+ of Nvme storage, etc. The key thing is that I need it to consume < 100 watts of power. I have tried a couple of them, and results are not great. I tried a Minisforum machine and it was a nightmare to get the NICs to be recognized. If you have been successful with any specific boxes in this class, that are literally "plug & play" with Proxmox, I'd love to know what you are using.

Thanks
Myles
 
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With linux its best to use hardware that is at least 1 or 2 years old. That way the drivers are more mature and the kernel supports the hardware better.
So not a good idea to buy the latest and greatest...especially on consumer hardware, where the manufacturers don't really care about linux compatability.
So I wouldn't buy a zen 3 or 4 based machine, but a zen 2 based.
 
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Dunuin said:
With linux its best to use hardware that is at least 1 or 2 years old. That way the drivers are more mature and the kernel supports the hardware better.
So not a good idea to buy the latest and greatest...especially on consumer hardware, where the manufacturers don't really care about linux compatability.
So I wouldn't buy a zen 3 or 4 based machine, but a zen 2 based.
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I specifically asked for a machine recommendation, not a strategy. I understand your point, but I am hoping someone has already gone down this path and been successful with a specific make/modem of Mini PC. The older machines don't have the power consumption or performance specs for what I need.
 
shanreich said:
I don't know the vendor, nor have I ever used this model with Proxmox - so I can give no guarantees. But this looks exactly like what you want: https://laptopwithlinux.com/product/gb-brr7h-4800/
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Thank you. Yes, that is *kinda* what I want. I have purchased the Minisforum HX90, but it took an act of god to get PM7 to work on it, and the NICs don't get recognized correctly on boot up each time, so I have to manually drop the network and restart it after boot to force the NICs to work, meaning that it isn't a good solution for enterprise class work. This is the machine:

https://store.minisforum.com/products/hx90

I'm trying to replace it, and I have had really great results outside of Proxmox with this machine:

https://www.chuwi.com/product/items/Chuwi-RZBox.html

I will take the one I have, pull out the Nvme drives and put in some spares to test out a PM install on it and report back to the group on the results. I was just hoping that someone else had already gone down this path and had a "This one worked great for me" report to offer.

Myles
 
Hi,
I am playing with a MinisForum HM80 (Ryzen 7) this weekend. I've replaced the SODIMM to have 64 GiB and added two SSD (Intel S3610). I've left a M.2 NVMe installed but currently unused - not sure what to do with it yet.

The two NICs worked out-of-the-box with the current PVE 7.2 fresh install. But I have only 1 GBit/s, so I just can not confirm that the INTEL I225-V delivers 2.5 GBit/s.

PVE is already installed and joined my homelab-cluster. Power consumption in idle is 14.5 Watt in this very moment.

Have a nice weekend :)
 
UdoB said:
Hi,
I am playing with a MinisForum HM80 (Ryzen 7) this weekend. I've replaced the SODIMM to have 64 GiB and added two SSD (Intel S3610). I've left a M.2 NVMe installed but currently unused - not sure what to do with it yet.

The two NICs worked out-of-the-box with the current PVE 7.2 fresh install. But I have only 1 GBit/s, so I just can not confirm that the INTEL I225-V delivers 2.5 GBit/s.

PVE is already installed and joined my homelab-cluster. Power consumption in idle is 14.5 Watt in this very moment.

Have a nice weekend :)
Click to expand...
Thank you. That's interesting. I tried 7.1 on the HX90, and it didn't work with the NICs. But your experience with 7.2 might be that they did something in the driver support that now works. I'll give my rig another try with 7.2 and see if that works. Thanks for the feedback.
 
mylesw said:
Thank you. That's interesting. I tried 7.1 on the HX90, and it didn't work with the NICs. But your experience with 7.2 might be that they did something in the driver support that now works. I'll give my rig another try with 7.2 and see if that works. Thanks for the feedback.
Click to expand...
You can also always try running the newer opt-in kernel which might have better/fixed drivers & firmware
 
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Does it need to be a pre-built mini PC? Otherwise look at an ITX motherboard with SFFPC case. IMHO the biggest limitation of these mini PCs (both pre-built and custom ITX-based builds) is only 2 RAM slots, and usually only a single M.2 slot. One ITX board that I know has two M.2 slots is the Asus ROG STRIX X470-I GAMING but I think the bus bandwidth is shared between the M.2 slots.
Having said all that, mini PCs are tiny, and you need to go a lot bigger to get past their limitations. I was recently looking for small cases for mATX boards, but there aren't very many available at all, and they're all huge in comparison to mini PCs.
 
So just an update to this thread.... Per uDoB's suggestion, I decided to take the plunge and I installed 7.3 VE on it. The amazing thing is that it worked out of the box. NICs recognized immediately, DHCP grabbed an IP just fine and following install, reboots perfectly. I guess this was a case of "bleeding edge" but I can vouch for the fact that Minisforum HX90 works great with PM 7.3. Hope this helps someone out down the line.
 
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PigLover said:
Maybe this? Ryzen 7 5825u, 2x m.2 for storage, supports 64gb & Intel i226-v nics. Seems to check all your boxes.

https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ry...ter-for-pfsense-opnsense-proxmox-and-windows/
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Yep, that would work. But I got my existing Minisforum machine going. However the thing that is intriguing here is the low power consumption. I'm thinking of putting a cluster of these boxes together, so I might just give that one a try as well. Thanks for the input.
 
Just my 2 cents: I rather would go for a HPE MicroServer Gen10. There is a new "v2" which support up tp 64GB RAM and has PCIe 4.0 on board. Regarding storage: I put in a Samsung 990 NVMe on a PCe card: Speed is up to 7200MB/s. Ubuntu is officialy supported: https://ubuntu.com/certified/202209-30657
 
mylesw said:
Does anyone have a recommendation for an AMD Ryzen based Mini PC that is compatible for Proxmox 6 or 7? I need something expandable to 64GB memory or more, 2TB+ of Nvme storage, etc. The key thing is that I need it to consume < 100 watts of power. I have tried a couple of them, and results are not great. I tried a Minisforum machine and it was a nightmare to get the NICs to be recognized. If you have been successful with any specific boxes in this class, that are literally "plug & play" with Proxmox, I'd love to know what you are using.

Thanks
Myles
Click to expand...
I am using the beelink ser5 5600h 32gb. Works great!
 
Two things: First, Patrick at STH has lots of reviews of mini-PCs he has tested as Proxmox nodes. His site is a great resource https://www.servethehome.com/
Second, FWIW, I am running an old HP Z640 workstation with a Xeon E5-2690V3 CPU and 64 GB of ram. I have 4 SSDs and 2 spinning disks installed. The machine averages 70 watts at the wall plug, because none of my workloads are really CPU intensive. You may find that you don't necessarily need a mini PC to be below your target. I am running Wordpress, Nextcloud, Monica, Tracks, Leantime, Portainer, Photoprism, Homeassistant, Heimdall, Guacamole, Mealie, Grocy, OpenMediaVault and a couple of Cloudflare connectors. I don't do Plex or any transcoding. YMMV
 
Here a E5-2683v4 + 8x 16GB RAM + 2x LSI SAS2008 HBAs + Geforce GT710 + Intel i350-T4 + Mellanox ConnectX-3 + 4x 3,5" HDDs + 14x 2,5" SSDs consumes ~110W Idle with ~180W when activlely using the server (maybe 30% load). Really depends on the stuff you add to the server. Idling without all the PCIe cards and only 2x SSDs is ~ 40W. So for the power consumption it is beneficial that these Mini-PCs don't offer reasonable upgrade capabilities...unless you add way too much USB devices, making it waste more space than a normal small tower PC... ;)
 
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