The original post: /r/homelab by /u/FangLeone2526 on 2024-09-28 22:09:50.

Hello!

Im currently running a Dell r730 as my main device. It’s running proxmox, with a ton of VMs. It draws 180w ATM and that’s kinda a lot, and I would like to move to a more portable, power efficient, system.

The most performance intensive things I run are kasm workspaces and paperless ngx, so CPU speed doesn’t need to be too amazing, but a lot of cores could be helpful as I’m doing virtualization. The r730 CPU is wayyy more than I need, which is nice, but not remotely necessary. It sits at 10-20% CPU usage most of the time. It is a xeon E5-2620 V3.

I also need a lot of ram, preferably more than 100gb. The standard recommendation I see from people is to get a mini PC, but most of the inexpensive mini PCs I see cant support more than 32 or 64gb of ram.

I’d also like to have decent options for storage. The Dell r730 is currently using all hard drives and gets pretty loud, so it would be wonderful if I could move toward all SSDs. This means I want a decent amount of sata and a decent amount of pcie that I can use for nvme drives ( Likely 4-6 nvme drives if I go nvme, but I can get pcie cards for this ). Storage speed isn’t hugely critical to anything I currently do, so I’m likely to go with sata, but that may change. It would be wonderful if I could fit 4-6 drives in the device itself if I do go with sata though.

It would also be great if it had a full pcie slot that I can use for a GPU, as I’ve been wanting to setup LLMs and Openai Whisper for a while, but this is not as crucial.

I don’t need the base system to include ram, or storage, but I would like for the base system to be expandable enough to support what I will one day put in it.

Power efficiency is less important than being cheap and portableish. The Dell r730 I got for 180$. If I could stay in the 100-300$ range for this that would be wonderful. I’ll likely be hunting for deals on eBay for whatever I find to be most cost effective way of doing this. I also only need gigabit networking, as I have a gigabit switch and gigabit router it will be attached to.

I’m currently thinking that I could achieve this via clustering many mini PCs, and though that would likely exceed 300$, it would be done over time as I slowly grew the cluster. Each mini PC’s low power draw of 7-15w at idle would mean that even with 5-6 of them it is still a huge decrease in power usage in comparison to the r730. Plus I would get redundancy, with any one of them being able to go down at any time, and offload it’s VMs to another host. This isn’t necessary though and id be totally happy with one device for this.

I’m also thinking I could still use the r730, just spin it up via ipmi once a week and do backups to the hard drives on it.

I would love any recommendations for mini PCs I could cluster for cheap or single devices which are this expandable for cheapish!