Tiny PC for Proxmox server / VMs

noxidjkram@hotm

noxidjkram@hotm

noxidjkram@hotm

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I'm looking to build a ProxMox server that will host a couple of VMs (mainly for isolated connectivity to work), plus maybe some other things that shouldn't tax it too much.

Been reading around "Tiny PC" Lenovo solutions that are pretty cheap second-hand.

Anyone have any experience of this sort of solution and any watchouts?

Cheers,
M
 
I’ve got a Topton N100 mini pc from Aliexpress, it was a barebones one so added 16GB Sodimm and m.2 drive.
It was about £120, there’s now one with a N150 chip for not much more.
You can get different specs of network, HDMI ports.

I run a Home Assistant VM and 3 LXC containers, it’s been on for nearly a year with no problems.
 
I have a few Lenovo Tiny. Mostly 6400T / 6500T 4c 4t but I think one might be 6100T 2c 4t.

Two are desktops running Linux and perform well.
I also have proxmox on one (32GB) with a few VM's for testing and runs fine.

These are similar performance to N100

Newer are obviously better but anything 8xxx up is still windows 11 compatible so not that cheap yet.
I paid about £40 for the base units and then memory. Note these only take SATA M.2 or 2.5 but the later ones are NVME if you need bandwidth.
 
Depending on your budget, check out the various mini Chinese PCs on Amazon such as Beelink. They’re good value for money, well specced and are certainly small
 
I'd suggest the Lenovo Mx20 line.... An M720, whilst aging a little, will give options on core count, upgrade options, pcie slot so you can add networking etc
 
Conan257 said:
I'd suggest the Lenovo Mx20 line.... An M720, whilst aging a little, will give options on core count, upgrade options, pcie slot so you can add networking etc
Click to expand...

Yup. That’s what I did. Well, on roids thanks to this:

github.com

GitHub - j4cbo/tiny5-m2-riser

Contribute to j4cbo/tiny5-m2-riser development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com

8700T, 32gb, 3x M2 drives and a dual 10Gbe NIC.
 
Conan257 said:
Worth noting that the m920 is needed for the extra m.2 drives I believe, m720 only does one out of the box.... Depressingly....
Click to expand...

Yep, that’s one of the strong points about that riser. Makes up for the shortfall on the 720. 4x on the 920 though. Storage up the wazoo.
 
I'm running Proxmox on a Lenovo M910q, i7-7700T / 40GB RAM, a Google Coral TPU and M.2 drive and internal SATA (plus a USB SATA drive for CCTV footage).

It runs Frigate/Home Assistant/Adguard/Octoprint/PBS, along with usually 2-3 dedicated game servers running at the same time. So far the only thing it's struggled with is Satisfactory. Obviously newer is better, but more ££; I think this cost me less than £300 in total.
 
Steveocee said:
HP do some nice mini Prodesk and Elitedesk units as well which are worth a look.
Click to expand...
I have an HP EliteDesk 800 with a i5 9500T (6C6T) that's been runnning a laundry list of lightweight stuff (Home Ass, Plex, Pihole, Ubiquity server etc) under Proxmox 24/7 for probably 5 years now. Zero troubles.
Only things I upgraded pretty much day one were the SSD (to an Intel one for more TBW resiliancy) and 16GB of ram. Once a year it gets the CPU cooler cleaned out. Done.
I had a 6th gen i5 version before that but it always fought me with H.265 decoding - I don't know why.

My only complaint about the HP is that it only has a Displayport output, no HDMI, which made early setup a pain at the time.

I'm now looking to upgrade to a bigger box so I can drop in a GPU and play with some locally hosted AI stuff.
 
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noxidjkram@hotm said:
I'm looking to build a ProxMox server that will host a couple of VMs (mainly for isolated connectivity to work), plus maybe some other things that shouldn't tax it too much.

Been reading around "Tiny PC" Lenovo solutions that are pretty cheap second-hand.

Anyone have any experience of this sort of solution and any watchouts?

Cheers,
M
Click to expand...
What did you end up going for?

I'm on a similar journey and have just invested in a elitedesk 800 g5 9500 (£160). It includes 2 m.2 nvme full length slots, 1 shorter M2 slot slot for the WiFi card and a 2.5" sata drive caddy.

My first gotcha was that the intel 9500 version has vents on the top of the case, similar to the 9700t and a fan on the 2.5" caddy. This lower profile caddy design blocks the second nvme slot.

I had also planned to buy dedicated 2/4tb per drive for the (planned) 3 drives in the system resulting in an up to 12tb home server.

So far I'm still tinkering with initial setup but I'm running, proxmox, home assistant (VM) and docker (lxc).
 
I use an Intel NUC with an Akasa silent case (the whole case is it heatsink). Works great! It's gen 7 intel but does exactly what I want it to do. It's off most of the time, I wake it with WOL from my phone.
 
I've got a couple of hosts running the little n100 mini's and they're great to be honest. Then I've got a couple more powerful hosts which are 100% overkill for what I need, because I like buying new hardware.
 
harryface said:
What did you end up going for?

I'm on a similar journey and have just invested in a elitedesk 800 g5 9500 (£160). It includes 2 m.2 nvme full length slots, 1 shorter M2 slot slot for the WiFi card and a 2.5" sata drive caddy.

My first gotcha was that the intel 9500 version has vents on the top of the case, similar to the 9700t and a fan on the 2.5" caddy. This lower profile caddy design blocks the second nvme slot.

I had also planned to buy dedicated 2/4tb per drive for the (planned) 3 drives in the system resulting in an up to 12tb home server.

So far I'm still tinkering with initial setup but I'm running, proxmox, home assistant (VM) and docker (lxc).
Click to expand...
My Elitedesk has been running proxmox 24/7 for a few years now, cant fault it.

Ideally get one with a QuickSync and vt-D capable processor. Being a able to expose the iGPU directly to a VM where you want hardware accelerated video transcoding is nice to have!

Intel AMT is also nice for remote management of the console directly. Be aware you'll need a dummy HDMI plug for that to work if you run it headless though.
 
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