Who runs the oldest Proxmox Server ?

RolandK

Renowned Member
Mar 5, 2019
924
173
88
50
Hello,
i was a VMware admin in my former life and one reason (of several) why i quit was , that i much disliked their policy of hardware support. It happened that server had been invalidated and declared "unsupported" or "incapable of running vmware" which were just about 4-5 years old.

I'm so happy that proxmox is so more better here and that it's such a flexible, solid and open solution and that proxmox is a company which listens to the customers and encourages participation. i hardly remember having so much fun and passion in participating in an opensource project.

I guess, skyrocketing energy prices will put pressure on obsoleting and updating older infrastructure, but to be honest - personally i'm having a hard time to find small/mid sized scalable business servers with really low energy demand, as it seems that new servers models are built for performance and not for consuming less power. that's good, if they run as many virtual machines as possible, but that's unfortunate if you have lower requirements for branch office for example. that's why we mostly quit buying brand new hardware...

Just being curious what's your oldest hardware running proxmox 7.2 in production (and why) - and whats your oldest hardware being regularly used with proxmox for private purpose or in a home-lab.

Would you like to share some information on what you're running and what's the spec of those machines?


Let's start:

Prod:
Multiple Fujitsu RX300 S6 (market launch 2012) with dual Xeon L5640 , crossflashed Dell Perc H310 HBA and 144GB RAM in Production with Proxmox 7.2. Temporary "addon capacity" during Xenserver Migration. Runs rock solid, no crashes. No user complaints.

Private:
Multiple Fujitsu Futro S600 Thin Clients (market launch 2013) with AMD G-T56N and 8GB RAM at different non-profit/hobbyists associations, running pve 7.2 and pbs 2.2. Used for VPN gateway and backing up the proxmox main server. Runs rocks solid. no crashes.
 
Last edited:
Just being curious what's your oldest hardware running proxmox 7.2 in production (and why) - and whats your oldest hardware being regularly used with proxmox for private purpose or in a home-lab.
I think Intel Xeons E3/E5 v2 to v4 are the best bang for the buck right now on the used hardware market and PVE 7.2 works fine on them. But they are also "only" 6-9 years old. Also, read here people were running PVE on Xeon W/X/E CPUs which should be even a few years older (11 to 16 years).
But the older the hardware gets, the more you run into compatibility problems.

PVE is based on Debian and a custom Ubuntu kernel. So as long as the hardware is still supported by Debian and Ubuntu it also should run fine with PVE.
 
  • Like
Reactions: RolandK
Multiple Fujitsu RX300 S6 (market launch 2012) with dual Xeon L5640
HP ML350G6, 24SFF, same CPU generation as you do, 288 GB-RAM, 3x HBA, 22 SAS 10K, 2 Samsung Enterprise SSD with one pool as my workstation, yet i have to say that e.g. PCIe passthrough gets worse and worse (or at least the problems with it). Also DL380G6 as backup PVE host if main PVE cluster fails.
 
  • Like
Reactions: RolandK
I started with Proxmox VE 3.2 on an Athlon 64 X2 but quickly upgraded to a 2012-era system. That same 2006 CPU now runs a Proxmox Backup Server (weekly) but I guess that doesn't count.
 
  • Like
Reactions: RolandK
Good morning,
a tertiary PBS in my homelab is running on
Code:
~# dmidecode  | grep -E "Release|N36L"
        Release Date: 09/30/2010
        Version: AMD Athlon(tm) II Neo N36L Dual-Core Processor
with rotating drives. Both age/power of the CPU and using ultra slow disks is definitely not recommended - but it works for me :)
 
  • Like
Reactions: RolandK
with rotating drives. Both age/power of the CPU and using ultra slow disks is definitely not recommended - but it works for me :)

I see Neo N36L is even more energy efficient then AMD G-T56N and if you just need to backup a bunch of VMs, i think it's pretty fine for that. on my s900, daily verify/gc/prune job on a 160gb datastore located on external usb disk is well <2h
 
Homelab:
Currently migrating the last containers from an HP Miniserver N54L running Proxmox 4.4 with an AMD Turion II Neo N54L.
Official CPU Release: May 12, 2010

It uses 65W with 4 spinning disks, so I'm thinking about moving my virtualised PBS server to that one due to the IO wait on the main server now.

Ironically, due to lack of free time, I took the "easy" way out and moved the oldest containers, which can't run on PVE 7.2, to a virtual PVE 4.4 on the main server while I get around to upgrade the applications to something newer.
 

About

The Proxmox community has been around for many years and offers help and support for Proxmox VE, Proxmox Backup Server, and Proxmox Mail Gateway.
We think our community is one of the best thanks to people like you!

Get your subscription!

The Proxmox team works very hard to make sure you are running the best software and getting stable updates and security enhancements, as well as quick enterprise support. Tens of thousands of happy customers have a Proxmox subscription. Get yours easily in our online shop.

Buy now!