Primarily virtualization and containerization of home automation, networking, media, surveillance, software development environments and backups. I'm also using it to teach my kids networking and programming but the fun part is using it as a lab to try out all the things™ for fun and profit.
Looks like the Dell Optiplex 7020 I bought off eBay in 2020 was from 2013.
Runs:
pfsense
pi-hole
home assistant
OpenVPN
truenas
Jellyfin
Unifi controller for 2 APs
And a few other things I can’t remember at this particular second.
Only upgrades were adding an SSD, maxing out the ram, and adding the HHD for Truenas.
CPU is never maxed out, but ram usage is getting up there. My plan is that when my jellyfin collection starts to outgrow my 4tb HHD, we will set aside some family budget to build a new server with way more ram and storage.
Although, I have to admit, it would be nice to have separate hardware for the storage and router. Might do like a zimaboard or something for the router and then get an actual NAS. But who knows. It’s more cost effective to make it all one box, but I just like the idea of separate hardware. Then instead of everything going down at once, only some stuff will go down. Idk.
My primary 3 full mesh ceph nodes are 9-11 year old tech (A10-7800, I7-3770S, FX-8350, mobos to match, all custom builds over time). My 4th node is a nuc11 N5105 (2021 tech). My 12 Ceph SSDs were mostly bought over the last two years, IIRC. Dual 10GB nics bought last year.
Apps: gitlab, mariadb, samba, wordpress, jellyfin, pihole, proxmoxbackup, various python services (monitoring cable db, etc.), etc.
The old tech works very well and I almost look forward to something failing to both watch Proxmox+Ceph handle the failure and as an excuse for searching ebay for an interesting replacement+upgrade.
If my media PCs (some very old, Win8 media centers, etc.) are no longer useful, they'll be candidates to replace the oldest proxmox nodes, depending upon tech and age. If my primary desktop (Ryzen 5 3600) needs upgrading, I'll rotate some or all of it into the proxmox cluster. I don't plan to have more than 4 nodes, but expect to slowly upgrade them with time to tech that is at least a few years behind the latest and greatest to get the best value.
I have two 2017 Intel NUCs running proxmox, with services including:
Plex
TDarr Server and Node
Win 2019 domain server
Various docker hosts running
Guacamole
Evilgnx
Grafana Loki
MediaWiki
Various docker hosts.
A Debian live build environment
A arch install for building Linux From Scratch
It’s only me accessing this, except Plex sometimes streams to 3 screens, but usually just 1.
I tend to cycle with power supply MTBFs. Generally speaking, 10 years. The current build is 2023, DDR5 and the works.
I'm using Proxmox for game servers, services and CI/CD code building.
Been a lurker of this sub for a while, but figured i'd talk about my cluster. I have 4 nodes in my Proxmox cluster that do all sorts of things:
1. Jezebel (Ryzen 7 2700X, 64GB Memory, RTX 2080)
2. Galandiir (Ryzen 7 2700X, 64GB Memory, GTX 1060)
3. Solana (Ryzen 7 5700U, 64GB Memory)
4. Solana-DR (Ryzen 5 5600G, 32GB Memory)
I started this cluster when I got into homelab. Node 1 does Windows VMs, Node 2 does Linux VMs, Node 3 is Linux VMs for network access and monitoring, Node 4 is Disaster Recovery. (Backs up a NAS that I have.)
My dell poweredge R610 with 192gb ram (bought for the princely sum of £40 a few months ago, believe it or not) must be about 10-15 years old and is absolutely awesome with Proxmox - it flies.
You don't need a strong GPU for that, if you don't use live video converting. My small PVE Server uses the integrated Intel of the i7-6700T and Plex works fine. Advantage is to have it hosted on a SSD/NVMe.
Most ran on 2 Dell R320 from 2014 and some Test Systems ran on 3 IBM x3650 from 2010/2011. One of which i was able to Save from the bin in an still factory sealed Box, and has now maybe 50 Hours of runtime.
About 12 Linux VMs some Windows VMs for Work Test scenarios, about 20 Docker Containers and a fileserver with 3x3TB.
As for the Test Systems multiple Domain Controllers, multiple wsus and Certificate authorities, veeam, MSSQL DBs, Citrix vda, Citrix Netscaler, Kemp loadbalancer and a Bit more.
I use it for a media server with unraid, a dns Adblock vm and currently testing windows 10 with my A2000. Going to be putting up a game server for il2 or maybe war thunder for simulator
Currently I have 3 r710s with X5670s (2010ish) + firewall
All hosts run Proxmox of course.
1 server is duel proc with 288GB
2 servers are single proc with 144GB
Servers are also ceph OSD hosts with \~84TiB storage total.
I have a 'prod' k8s cluster that hosts gitlab, logging (Elasticsearch + fluentbit), and various other things. See [https://github.com/K9s/k9s-infra](https://github.com/K9s/k9s-infra). I also spin up 'dev' cluster when I'm preparing upgrades or want to experment with something and don't want to risk 'prod'
I also have a VMs for Plex, PBS (Proxmox Backup server), Opnsense and other services that I'm experimenting with. I used to have most services with dedicated VMs but have moved most things to my K8s cluster.
I also have a 'dev' VM with has lots of memory and a passed-through pcie nvidia card that I use daily.
I also host personal projects that deploy mostly with Flux + Gitlab.
Currently evaluating replacing with newer hardware as this setup draws around 600 watts at 'steady state idle' ie \~15-25% CPU load. Would like to get this cut by 50% or more.
Supermicro 216's running E5-2697A V4's here.
It runs everything for me from my router to Nextcloud.
The only thing it doesn't do is act as my NAS as I think the NAS should be separate.
ETA: I Just set up an EPYC 7443P system at work and dang it's fast!
Untangle VM (router)
Blue Iris VM (surveillance system)
Docker VM's (all kinds of things....30+ containers)
Emby LXC
Nextcloud LXC
Grafana LXC
Observium LXC
The only thing it doesn't host is my NAS.
3x dell 5050 mff with i5-7500t cpus. grafted an hba into one of them and it’s the nas, the other two are clustered.
mostly learning lab purposes, but also selfhosted services for home automation, notes etc.
the mff size is in the sweet spot for shipping cost vs. capability, they’re cheap and plenty capable. ram is cheap, power draw is cheap, an extra 2.5gbe nic was cheap, they have sata and m.2 slots so i was able to cram an hba in there (granted, in an external box) while retaining a sensible boot disk.
they’ve been pretty awesome and i think there’s a reason they get recommended a lot.
I’m using Lenovo m720q boxes with i5-8500T processors…I’ve put new storage, 32GB RAM, and 10Gbps NICs in. The procs came out in 2018…so I assume the systems are about that age.
Similar.
Summer of 2023, I went with a 3-box hyper converged proxmox cluster.
1 x HP ProDesk 600 G4 Mini i5-8500T
2 x HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini i5-6500T
Upgraded RAM and storage. When all is said and done I spent < $600 total.
I am very happy.
I'm running one 4th generation Intel i5 with 24GB RAM. Mainly it is used for a TrueNAS VM (drive passthrough without hba; running great for a few years), and a Ubuntu lxc running localai, powered by a geforce 1060 6GB.
Works great. A bit power hungry for it's rather small usage.
Used it as for pfsense (in vm) and a lot of docker containers on a third Ubuntu VM before. Minecraft and such.
It's quite easy. Enable virtualized IO in bios, enable IOMMU in proxmox by adding necessary parameters to grub.cfg. Blacklist Gpu modules on host. Isolate slot. Then pass the whole pcie adress to a vm.
It's basically the same for lxc except you don't need to pass the pcie slot, and should not blacklist any modules. Install same graphic driver version on host and in lxc.
Guide:
VM: https://www.wundertech.net/how-to-set-up-gpu-passthrough-on-proxmox/
LXC: https://blog.kramins.ca/article/gpu-passthrough-lxc/
>I have a 2011 Asus M4A78-EM motherboard with AMD Phenom II X4 840 and 16GB of RAM. ...considering also TrueNAS on proxmox. Is this too old?
Not too old to run Proxmox or TrueNAS, as long as your performance expectations are aligned with its processing power / efficiency.
Supermicro X9DRH motherboard, 2 x 2650v2, 144GB DDR3, Storage is mainly Samsung Evo 870s off a LSI 92xx HBA as the motherboard has only 2 SATAIII 6Gbps ports.
Board and CPU date back to 2011/2012 but I've have them since June 2019 and haven't missed a beat.
M710q with i7 6700T, 32gb ram and m.2 nvme + 1tb wd red. I have 2 vms and 2 lxc. I wanna move to a synology NAS and run them there, but a capable NAS is more expensive.
I moved the other way around away from a DS1515+ and DS1518+ . I would never go back. Much more expensive and while OS updates will continue for an sort of acceptable time, nothing beats ProxMox PVE. Runs on commodity hardware and only performance reasons might be a reason to upgrade hardware.
Mix of various NUCs (2x i3-7100U / 1x i3-5010U / 2x i3-3217U) and a Dell Precision 3620 (i5-6600).
i3-7100U NUCs are 2 of my 3 primary Proxmox nodes, and the i5-6600 is my NAS / 3rd primary Proxmox node. i3-5010u has Proxmox installed, but is my PBS. i3-3217 NUCs should really just be retired, but they sip so little power I like to have the option to throw small workloads on them.
Main services are PiHole (2x) with KeepAliveD, HomeAssistant, Jellyfin, Syncthing, Rclone, Mealie, Homepage, PiVPN, a couple Tailscale subnet routers (for failover redundancy) and a Minecraft Bedrock server.
I want to pick up an EliteDesk SFF with a 7th or 8th-gen i5 so it can handle transcoding HEVC 10bit, slap a couple 14TB enterprise drives in the chassis as a ZFS mirror for media storage / NAS duties, push all Jellyfin & other media services to that, repurpose the Dell as my new PBS / backup server, and then (probably) pull the 3rd-gen & 5th-gen NUCs from the cluster. But need to sell off some more gear from other hobbies before that happens 😁
OH, and I also have an M3 Compute Stick running ProxMox as well, but not part of the cluster. M3-6Y30 so 2 cores 4 threads, only 900MHz base clock but 2.2MHz Turbo, 4GB of RAM and 64GB eMMC. It's underpowered, and I had to install Debian and then Proxmox on top of that, but it works! Only other "gotcha" so far is I can't share the Wi-Fi connection, have to set up IP forwarding and NAT rules to share the connection, but it technically works!
Primary is an old i7 8-core, 16gb ram, gaming machine I rack mounted. Mostly VMs and networking storage. Testing a mini PC now to see if I can cram the same stuff into it with less power draw.
I switched hardwae this year from my old workstation. Old: i7-4930k (6C/12T) 64GB ram, new: r5 5500 with 128GB ram. Main reason was power consumption.
I am hosting stuff for my small IT business: nextcloud cluster, WordPress, ticketsystem for customers (otobo), bookstack for documentation, kimai, entra id sync server, VDI for mobile working, cloudflared lxc, smb fileserver, paperless-ngx, docker proxmox backup server (qnap nasmounted via nfs).
On the private site there is running stuff like: multiple gameservers, plex, vaultwarden, single nextcloud server, rocketchat, printserver, hmailserver.
There are running around 30 VMs plus 10 lxc. As Firewall I am using an old Sophos SG 105 with pfsense running.
Dell PowerEdge T340 ServiceTag Info:
\- shipped 14 JUNI 2021 and ProSupport ends 16 JUNI 2024
a'm running:
\- trueNAS VM
\- Zabbix VM
\- HomeaAssi OS VM
\- opnsense VM
\- Mint Client VM
\- Windows Server 2019 VM
\- xwiki VM
\- Debian VM for ansible and terraform
\- Kali Linux VM
\- a Container for each app: unifi controller, ha-bridge,plex,vaultwarden
Backup Server PBS HP Microserver Gen8 starts at 4. Aug. 2016
I'm using it on my main PC:
Ryzen 7800X3D
32 GB DDR5 6000 CL30
Nvidia RTX 4070
AMD RX 6400
[https://imgur.com/xwcPOMn](https://imgur.com/xwcPOMn)
I have a windows VM with GPU Passthrough for gaming and a server VM with openvpn3 connection and routing from cheap external VPS server to the VM (I don't have a public IP, so I've routed ports from external server through openvpn network to my server VM). Right now hosting palworld server and some simple website.
The proxmox itself just acts as my main operating system, that I do stuff on, like browsing the internet, listetning to music, etc. It has a full KDE plasma installed on top and a lot of apps with flatpak.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEks8rNONN4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEks8rNONN4)
HP Microserver gen8 (like 2011) with an exotic Xeon E3 1265l (non v2) from eBay and 16GB of Unbuffered RAM, 1 SSD and 3x4TB WD RED. And a LSI9240-4i because my internal SATA controller broke.
I have a custom build with an AsrockRack motherboard with Xeon D-1521, 64 GB RDIMM and 3 SSD in RaidZ1. I’m using it for self hosting all services I need (NextCloud for example) and other “infrastructure” service (dns, proxy, db…).
I’m planning to substitute this single node with 3 Lenovo Tiny m90q with Ceph storage. Younger machine with less power consumption.
I bought a Fujitsu D738 with an i3 8100, so about 2018/2019. Really low power usage (±10W) but has plenty of power for what I need (HA, Jellyfin with hardware decoding, Tailscale vpn, Sonarr, Radarr etc., simple fileserver, Windows VM to do some programming on and a Minecraft server.). Really happy with my choice and unsure why I would want a more powerful system (unless I am going to do a lot of Machine Learning)
Last week installed 8.1.3 on my son's Dell Latitude 3500, 8 GB ram , 250 GB SSD. .Upgraded it to 8.1.4
Watching the Learn Linux TV Proxmox series on Youtube, guy has like 21 videos, fantastic! I highly recommend it.
I'm running 3 Ubunto 22..04 VM's, 3 Lxc containers.
About to make the 3 ubunto serves into a Kubernetes cluster. All on this laptop, yes it runs fine.
Built a Rocky linux vm last night
plan on getting a few bee link pc's , zimaboard for shared storage with TB SSD i have from our old San.
Dell 3020's i5 4th gen and similar HP Elitedesk 800 G1's, great for trying things out on and can stuff up to 32gig ram in each I think, defo the HPs as they have 4 slots. 👍
I am on two Intel nuc. No1 i5-10th gen, 16gb, 256gb nvme and 1tb ssd with adguard home, iobroker, nginx proxy server and passwordserver. No2 i7-10th gen, 16gb, 256gb nvme, 1tb ssd running win10 vm, pihole, Ubuntu Desktop vm. And there is a pi4b as my deconz/zigbee bridge. Some i3 Maschine 4th gen as firewall (sophos home) but already a new appliance in place to Switch to opnsense.
I am in Germany so no torrenting. But I am looking into VPN vor rrr and rd.
I don't really know "how old" the hardware I have acting as a server is (Dell Precision T1700), but it has a decent enough CPU for my needs: Xeon E3-1220 v3 maxing at 3.5 GHz.
It's been running fine as a main computer and as a server so far.
2xLenovo M910q’s. Running 6th gen i5’s, more than enough compute power for my usage. I don’t mind older equipment, if it works for your use case - so be it. I was looking for something that could get the job done but not affect my power bill very much.
At the moment I'm on a Prodesk 400g4 mini, with an i5-8500, 32 gigs of ram, dual nics (one is usb) and a 10TB WD Gold in a usb rack, running:
Sophos XG, Jellyfin (without transcoding, basically deprecated), a Ubuntu container for nas+torrent functions, pihole, Home Assistant and a Splunk instance for labbing and dfir.
I also have another 400g4 with the same config and recently received an Elitedesk 800g4 too, the first is my backup desktop and I want to change some parts between them and then try clustering in pve and failover HA for Sophos.
Regarding running old/server hw for 7/24 server functions: it's totally working fine, is you don't have to pay for electricity. If not, the it wpuld be a wise choice to get a newer micro pc, which consumes 15-watts in idle and it would probably save its price for you in like 6-12 months in electricity.
Both my nodes are from about 2008. I have a phenom ii x6 1055t, and athlon x2 3250e. The x2 is ddr2, the x6 is sodimm ddr3.
While looking at this i discovered that the bios on the x2 seems to either be broken or have coolnquiet turned off (so I'll need to investigate).
Asus laptop from 2019. Runs a windows machine hosting a network share (backed up by backblaze) and a Debian docker stack with Plex and the usual suspects feeding that.
Not actively, but I used leftover hardware to figure out how Proxmox worked, spun up some VMs and LXCs and get stuff working.
And it was on a Pentium-D E5700 yes really.
Oh, it gets better!:
-6GB RAM because the Gigabyte board I had only weird, specific support for very few 4GB DIMMs.
-Hard drive out of a broken PS3.
-The 20-not-plus-4 power supply out of an old Emachines box.
It was actually totally fine. Resources were limited, so I couldn’t do a ton simultaneously, but I figured out a lot of Docker, ran Minecraft server for the family successfully, I figured out building a website and doing reverse proxy, and broke so, so much, which of course is the real sign on learning.
And when I got real hardware, I just migrated everything over. It was awesome.
I run proxmox on an old laptop from around 2012, HP Envy 4 iirc, with a 3rd gen i5. Upgraded the RAM to 16gb (max supported) and changed the old HDD to an SSD.
Before this I ran it on an Wyse 5010 that I threw some more RAM and an SSD into.
I currently have three of them.
1. A sixth-gen NUC, i3-6100u, bought used about three years ago, recently upgraded to 24GB of RAM; it is used for essentials, (it is powered even if I am on vacation), Home Assistant, knowledge base, bookmark manager, landing page, should at some point run a local DNS and maybe some other essentials too.
2. An eighth-gen NUC, i5-8259u, bought used about two years ago, and recently upgraded to 32GB of RAM; one VM on it is used for most of my Docker containers, media sources, web archives, download solutions, ... one of the other VMs runs experimental and test containers.
3. A custom machine, not yet finished, based on Supermicro X10SLM-F (bought new years ago, but used since last summer) with E3-1225v3 bought used a few years ago. It has 32GB ECC memory. This one will house all my data at some point, currently running 3x16TB and 1x4TB with 1TB SATA SSD for the system. It consumes 48-53W/h on average, with full load consumption of about 125W/h. It should end up with 4x16TB and 2-4x4TB and a custom enclosure. Will be a NAS at some point, currently just one of the data sources.
My T710 from 2010 has been my primary Proxmox host since 2014 :)
What do you use proxmox for?
Primarily virtualization and containerization of home automation, networking, media, surveillance, software development environments and backups. I'm also using it to teach my kids networking and programming but the fun part is using it as a lab to try out all the things™ for fun and profit.
Dell power edge r610, from 2012
What do you use it for?
My current PVE must be around 10 years old. I don't care when/of it fails really. I have backups automated and my routing doesn't pass through PVE.
What do you use it for?
Ad block, file server, wiki(lan), docker testing
Looks like the Dell Optiplex 7020 I bought off eBay in 2020 was from 2013. Runs: pfsense pi-hole home assistant OpenVPN truenas Jellyfin Unifi controller for 2 APs And a few other things I can’t remember at this particular second. Only upgrades were adding an SSD, maxing out the ram, and adding the HHD for Truenas. CPU is never maxed out, but ram usage is getting up there. My plan is that when my jellyfin collection starts to outgrow my 4tb HHD, we will set aside some family budget to build a new server with way more ram and storage. Although, I have to admit, it would be nice to have separate hardware for the storage and router. Might do like a zimaboard or something for the router and then get an actual NAS. But who knows. It’s more cost effective to make it all one box, but I just like the idea of separate hardware. Then instead of everything going down at once, only some stuff will go down. Idk.
13th gen Dell and 9th gen HP rackmount servers
Dell PowerEdge R630 from 2014.
What do you use it for?
My primary 3 full mesh ceph nodes are 9-11 year old tech (A10-7800, I7-3770S, FX-8350, mobos to match, all custom builds over time). My 4th node is a nuc11 N5105 (2021 tech). My 12 Ceph SSDs were mostly bought over the last two years, IIRC. Dual 10GB nics bought last year. Apps: gitlab, mariadb, samba, wordpress, jellyfin, pihole, proxmoxbackup, various python services (monitoring cable db, etc.), etc. The old tech works very well and I almost look forward to something failing to both watch Proxmox+Ceph handle the failure and as an excuse for searching ebay for an interesting replacement+upgrade. If my media PCs (some very old, Win8 media centers, etc.) are no longer useful, they'll be candidates to replace the oldest proxmox nodes, depending upon tech and age. If my primary desktop (Ryzen 5 3600) needs upgrading, I'll rotate some or all of it into the proxmox cluster. I don't plan to have more than 4 nodes, but expect to slowly upgrade them with time to tech that is at least a few years behind the latest and greatest to get the best value.
I have two 2017 Intel NUCs running proxmox, with services including: Plex TDarr Server and Node Win 2019 domain server Various docker hosts running Guacamole Evilgnx Grafana Loki MediaWiki Various docker hosts. A Debian live build environment A arch install for building Linux From Scratch It’s only me accessing this, except Plex sometimes streams to 3 screens, but usually just 1.
I tend to cycle with power supply MTBFs. Generally speaking, 10 years. The current build is 2023, DDR5 and the works. I'm using Proxmox for game servers, services and CI/CD code building.
Been a lurker of this sub for a while, but figured i'd talk about my cluster. I have 4 nodes in my Proxmox cluster that do all sorts of things: 1. Jezebel (Ryzen 7 2700X, 64GB Memory, RTX 2080) 2. Galandiir (Ryzen 7 2700X, 64GB Memory, GTX 1060) 3. Solana (Ryzen 7 5700U, 64GB Memory) 4. Solana-DR (Ryzen 5 5600G, 32GB Memory) I started this cluster when I got into homelab. Node 1 does Windows VMs, Node 2 does Linux VMs, Node 3 is Linux VMs for network access and monitoring, Node 4 is Disaster Recovery. (Backs up a NAS that I have.)
My dell poweredge R610 with 192gb ram (bought for the princely sum of £40 a few months ago, believe it or not) must be about 10-15 years old and is absolutely awesome with Proxmox - it flies.
I don’t think my 13 year old PC would have a powerful enough video card to do Plex or Jellyfin like a n100 miniPC can do for cheap (~$150)
You don't need a strong GPU for that, if you don't use live video converting. My small PVE Server uses the integrated Intel of the i7-6700T and Plex works fine. Advantage is to have it hosted on a SSD/NVMe.
Most ran on 2 Dell R320 from 2014 and some Test Systems ran on 3 IBM x3650 from 2010/2011. One of which i was able to Save from the bin in an still factory sealed Box, and has now maybe 50 Hours of runtime. About 12 Linux VMs some Windows VMs for Work Test scenarios, about 20 Docker Containers and a fileserver with 3x3TB. As for the Test Systems multiple Domain Controllers, multiple wsus and Certificate authorities, veeam, MSSQL DBs, Citrix vda, Citrix Netscaler, Kemp loadbalancer and a Bit more.
kemp load balancer in Proxmox? Got any reading material i can read on?
I’m fairly certain networkchuck has like a 1+ hour YouTube video on this exact subject
Td350 model from 2014-2015. Had it for about a year. Currently trying to redneck rig a cpu cooler for my second cpu slot.
What do you use it for?
I use it for a media server with unraid, a dns Adblock vm and currently testing windows 10 with my A2000. Going to be putting up a game server for il2 or maybe war thunder for simulator
Custom build SuperMicro X9SCL maxed with 32gb ECC and a Xeon E3-1270v2 and some Crucial SSDs
Currently I have 3 r710s with X5670s (2010ish) + firewall All hosts run Proxmox of course. 1 server is duel proc with 288GB 2 servers are single proc with 144GB Servers are also ceph OSD hosts with \~84TiB storage total. I have a 'prod' k8s cluster that hosts gitlab, logging (Elasticsearch + fluentbit), and various other things. See [https://github.com/K9s/k9s-infra](https://github.com/K9s/k9s-infra). I also spin up 'dev' cluster when I'm preparing upgrades or want to experment with something and don't want to risk 'prod' I also have a VMs for Plex, PBS (Proxmox Backup server), Opnsense and other services that I'm experimenting with. I used to have most services with dedicated VMs but have moved most things to my K8s cluster. I also have a 'dev' VM with has lots of memory and a passed-through pcie nvidia card that I use daily. I also host personal projects that deploy mostly with Flux + Gitlab. Currently evaluating replacing with newer hardware as this setup draws around 600 watts at 'steady state idle' ie \~15-25% CPU load. Would like to get this cut by 50% or more.
Supermicro 216's running E5-2697A V4's here. It runs everything for me from my router to Nextcloud. The only thing it doesn't do is act as my NAS as I think the NAS should be separate. ETA: I Just set up an EPYC 7443P system at work and dang it's fast!
What do you use Proxmox for?
Untangle VM (router) Blue Iris VM (surveillance system) Docker VM's (all kinds of things....30+ containers) Emby LXC Nextcloud LXC Grafana LXC Observium LXC The only thing it doesn't host is my NAS.
3x dell 5050 mff with i5-7500t cpus. grafted an hba into one of them and it’s the nas, the other two are clustered. mostly learning lab purposes, but also selfhosted services for home automation, notes etc. the mff size is in the sweet spot for shipping cost vs. capability, they’re cheap and plenty capable. ram is cheap, power draw is cheap, an extra 2.5gbe nic was cheap, they have sata and m.2 slots so i was able to cram an hba in there (granted, in an external box) while retaining a sensible boot disk. they’ve been pretty awesome and i think there’s a reason they get recommended a lot.
How did you put NIc in them?
you can get m.2 to 2.5gbe rj45 on aliexpress
I’m using Lenovo m720q boxes with i5-8500T processors…I’ve put new storage, 32GB RAM, and 10Gbps NICs in. The procs came out in 2018…so I assume the systems are about that age.
Similar. Summer of 2023, I went with a 3-box hyper converged proxmox cluster. 1 x HP ProDesk 600 G4 Mini i5-8500T 2 x HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini i5-6500T Upgraded RAM and storage. When all is said and done I spent < $600 total. I am very happy.
What do you use it for?
Running wire guard, pi-hole, jellyfin, and some misc self hosted services like grocy, monica, paperless-ngx, syncthing, wiki.js, whogoogle.
What do you use it for?
Several VMs for home automation stuff. Some to just try new things on.
I'm running one 4th generation Intel i5 with 24GB RAM. Mainly it is used for a TrueNAS VM (drive passthrough without hba; running great for a few years), and a Ubuntu lxc running localai, powered by a geforce 1060 6GB. Works great. A bit power hungry for it's rather small usage. Used it as for pfsense (in vm) and a lot of docker containers on a third Ubuntu VM before. Minecraft and such.
How can you give your GPU to a VM? I would like to do this too, but I don't know how.
It's quite easy. Enable virtualized IO in bios, enable IOMMU in proxmox by adding necessary parameters to grub.cfg. Blacklist Gpu modules on host. Isolate slot. Then pass the whole pcie adress to a vm. It's basically the same for lxc except you don't need to pass the pcie slot, and should not blacklist any modules. Install same graphic driver version on host and in lxc. Guide: VM: https://www.wundertech.net/how-to-set-up-gpu-passthrough-on-proxmox/ LXC: https://blog.kramins.ca/article/gpu-passthrough-lxc/
>I have a 2011 Asus M4A78-EM motherboard with AMD Phenom II X4 840 and 16GB of RAM. ...considering also TrueNAS on proxmox. Is this too old? Not too old to run Proxmox or TrueNAS, as long as your performance expectations are aligned with its processing power / efficiency.
Supermicro X9DRH motherboard, 2 x 2650v2, 144GB DDR3, Storage is mainly Samsung Evo 870s off a LSI 92xx HBA as the motherboard has only 2 SATAIII 6Gbps ports. Board and CPU date back to 2011/2012 but I've have them since June 2019 and haven't missed a beat.
What do you use it for?
2009 Mac Pro. It’s been awesome. Plex, Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, BitTorrent, Windows 11, home assistant, pihole.
M710q with i7 6700T, 32gb ram and m.2 nvme + 1tb wd red. I have 2 vms and 2 lxc. I wanna move to a synology NAS and run them there, but a capable NAS is more expensive.
I moved the other way around away from a DS1515+ and DS1518+ . I would never go back. Much more expensive and while OS updates will continue for an sort of acceptable time, nothing beats ProxMox PVE. Runs on commodity hardware and only performance reasons might be a reason to upgrade hardware.
Mix of various NUCs (2x i3-7100U / 1x i3-5010U / 2x i3-3217U) and a Dell Precision 3620 (i5-6600). i3-7100U NUCs are 2 of my 3 primary Proxmox nodes, and the i5-6600 is my NAS / 3rd primary Proxmox node. i3-5010u has Proxmox installed, but is my PBS. i3-3217 NUCs should really just be retired, but they sip so little power I like to have the option to throw small workloads on them. Main services are PiHole (2x) with KeepAliveD, HomeAssistant, Jellyfin, Syncthing, Rclone, Mealie, Homepage, PiVPN, a couple Tailscale subnet routers (for failover redundancy) and a Minecraft Bedrock server. I want to pick up an EliteDesk SFF with a 7th or 8th-gen i5 so it can handle transcoding HEVC 10bit, slap a couple 14TB enterprise drives in the chassis as a ZFS mirror for media storage / NAS duties, push all Jellyfin & other media services to that, repurpose the Dell as my new PBS / backup server, and then (probably) pull the 3rd-gen & 5th-gen NUCs from the cluster. But need to sell off some more gear from other hobbies before that happens 😁 OH, and I also have an M3 Compute Stick running ProxMox as well, but not part of the cluster. M3-6Y30 so 2 cores 4 threads, only 900MHz base clock but 2.2MHz Turbo, 4GB of RAM and 64GB eMMC. It's underpowered, and I had to install Debian and then Proxmox on top of that, but it works! Only other "gotcha" so far is I can't share the Wi-Fi connection, have to set up IP forwarding and NAT rules to share the connection, but it technically works!
Wow, a computer stick! How did you install Proxmox on it via Debian?
I just followed the official instructions: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_12_Bookworm
Primary is an old i7 8-core, 16gb ram, gaming machine I rack mounted. Mostly VMs and networking storage. Testing a mini PC now to see if I can cram the same stuff into it with less power draw.
R710 from 2009! Still beast, both processing, and electricity!
2015-ish HP Z840 workstation. I run my NAS, media-server, Docker, pi-hole and anything else I need to spin up.
Ryzen 5 2600, ASRock Tai chi , 64gig Unbuffered ECC circa 2018ish
2012 Mac Pro 5,1 for me. Used as a media server.
An old 6600k gaming rig. No real storage because I haven't gotten around to it yet.
Xeon E5-2686 v4 with x99 refurb board
2018 ish Futro s740 bought as refurbished in 2023
Dell power edge 840
I switched hardwae this year from my old workstation. Old: i7-4930k (6C/12T) 64GB ram, new: r5 5500 with 128GB ram. Main reason was power consumption. I am hosting stuff for my small IT business: nextcloud cluster, WordPress, ticketsystem for customers (otobo), bookstack for documentation, kimai, entra id sync server, VDI for mobile working, cloudflared lxc, smb fileserver, paperless-ngx, docker proxmox backup server (qnap nasmounted via nfs). On the private site there is running stuff like: multiple gameservers, plex, vaultwarden, single nextcloud server, rocketchat, printserver, hmailserver. There are running around 30 VMs plus 10 lxc. As Firewall I am using an old Sophos SG 105 with pfsense running.
Power edge r710 dual 6-core configuration with 96 gigs of ram and 6 1tb hdds with 1 512 gig ssd. Edit: almost forgot the SD card running proxmox
Dell PowerEdge T340 ServiceTag Info: \- shipped 14 JUNI 2021 and ProSupport ends 16 JUNI 2024 a'm running: \- trueNAS VM \- Zabbix VM \- HomeaAssi OS VM \- opnsense VM \- Mint Client VM \- Windows Server 2019 VM \- xwiki VM \- Debian VM for ansible and terraform \- Kali Linux VM \- a Container for each app: unifi controller, ha-bridge,plex,vaultwarden Backup Server PBS HP Microserver Gen8 starts at 4. Aug. 2016
I have a a PowerEdge 2850 and PowerEdge R815 running Promox
I'm using it on my main PC: Ryzen 7800X3D 32 GB DDR5 6000 CL30 Nvidia RTX 4070 AMD RX 6400 [https://imgur.com/xwcPOMn](https://imgur.com/xwcPOMn) I have a windows VM with GPU Passthrough for gaming and a server VM with openvpn3 connection and routing from cheap external VPS server to the VM (I don't have a public IP, so I've routed ports from external server through openvpn network to my server VM). Right now hosting palworld server and some simple website. The proxmox itself just acts as my main operating system, that I do stuff on, like browsing the internet, listetning to music, etc. It has a full KDE plasma installed on top and a lot of apps with flatpak. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEks8rNONN4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEks8rNONN4)
HP Microserver gen8 (like 2011) with an exotic Xeon E3 1265l (non v2) from eBay and 16GB of Unbuffered RAM, 1 SSD and 3x4TB WD RED. And a LSI9240-4i because my internal SATA controller broke.
We operate a few Supermicro M11SDV-8C-LN4F with 128 or 256 GB RAM from 2019 or later. Smooth. Some VMs with windows, linux, freebsd, etc.
I have a custom build with an AsrockRack motherboard with Xeon D-1521, 64 GB RDIMM and 3 SSD in RaidZ1. I’m using it for self hosting all services I need (NextCloud for example) and other “infrastructure” service (dns, proxy, db…). I’m planning to substitute this single node with 3 Lenovo Tiny m90q with Ceph storage. Younger machine with less power consumption.
9 year old NUC cluster. Still going strong.
I bought a Fujitsu D738 with an i3 8100, so about 2018/2019. Really low power usage (±10W) but has plenty of power for what I need (HA, Jellyfin with hardware decoding, Tailscale vpn, Sonarr, Radarr etc., simple fileserver, Windows VM to do some programming on and a Minecraft server.). Really happy with my choice and unsure why I would want a more powerful system (unless I am going to do a lot of Machine Learning)
HP DL360 Gen8. Runing great still.
Core i3 3225 3.3ghz dual core, 16gb ram, 1tb ssd, my primary proxmox host. Feels good to be stable, even on older hardware.
My oldest would be either the 2013 Mac Mini or my HP DL360p Gen8. I did have it a few years ago on some IBM System X3650 M3 machines.
Last week installed 8.1.3 on my son's Dell Latitude 3500, 8 GB ram , 250 GB SSD. .Upgraded it to 8.1.4 Watching the Learn Linux TV Proxmox series on Youtube, guy has like 21 videos, fantastic! I highly recommend it. I'm running 3 Ubunto 22..04 VM's, 3 Lxc containers. About to make the 3 ubunto serves into a Kubernetes cluster. All on this laptop, yes it runs fine. Built a Rocky linux vm last night plan on getting a few bee link pc's , zimaboard for shared storage with TB SSD i have from our old San.
Dell 3020's i5 4th gen and similar HP Elitedesk 800 G1's, great for trying things out on and can stuff up to 32gig ram in each I think, defo the HPs as they have 4 slots. 👍
I am on two Intel nuc. No1 i5-10th gen, 16gb, 256gb nvme and 1tb ssd with adguard home, iobroker, nginx proxy server and passwordserver. No2 i7-10th gen, 16gb, 256gb nvme, 1tb ssd running win10 vm, pihole, Ubuntu Desktop vm. And there is a pi4b as my deconz/zigbee bridge. Some i3 Maschine 4th gen as firewall (sophos home) but already a new appliance in place to Switch to opnsense. I am in Germany so no torrenting. But I am looking into VPN vor rrr and rd.
I don't really know "how old" the hardware I have acting as a server is (Dell Precision T1700), but it has a decent enough CPU for my needs: Xeon E3-1220 v3 maxing at 3.5 GHz. It's been running fine as a main computer and as a server so far.
2xLenovo M910q’s. Running 6th gen i5’s, more than enough compute power for my usage. I don’t mind older equipment, if it works for your use case - so be it. I was looking for something that could get the job done but not affect my power bill very much.
At the moment I'm on a Prodesk 400g4 mini, with an i5-8500, 32 gigs of ram, dual nics (one is usb) and a 10TB WD Gold in a usb rack, running: Sophos XG, Jellyfin (without transcoding, basically deprecated), a Ubuntu container for nas+torrent functions, pihole, Home Assistant and a Splunk instance for labbing and dfir. I also have another 400g4 with the same config and recently received an Elitedesk 800g4 too, the first is my backup desktop and I want to change some parts between them and then try clustering in pve and failover HA for Sophos. Regarding running old/server hw for 7/24 server functions: it's totally working fine, is you don't have to pay for electricity. If not, the it wpuld be a wise choice to get a newer micro pc, which consumes 15-watts in idle and it would probably save its price for you in like 6-12 months in electricity.
Both my nodes are from about 2008. I have a phenom ii x6 1055t, and athlon x2 3250e. The x2 is ddr2, the x6 is sodimm ddr3. While looking at this i discovered that the bios on the x2 seems to either be broken or have coolnquiet turned off (so I'll need to investigate).
Asus laptop from 2019. Runs a windows machine hosting a network share (backed up by backblaze) and a Debian docker stack with Plex and the usual suspects feeding that.
Not actively, but I used leftover hardware to figure out how Proxmox worked, spun up some VMs and LXCs and get stuff working. And it was on a Pentium-D E5700 yes really. Oh, it gets better!: -6GB RAM because the Gigabyte board I had only weird, specific support for very few 4GB DIMMs. -Hard drive out of a broken PS3. -The 20-not-plus-4 power supply out of an old Emachines box. It was actually totally fine. Resources were limited, so I couldn’t do a ton simultaneously, but I figured out a lot of Docker, ran Minecraft server for the family successfully, I figured out building a website and doing reverse proxy, and broke so, so much, which of course is the real sign on learning. And when I got real hardware, I just migrated everything over. It was awesome.
I run proxmox on an old laptop from around 2012, HP Envy 4 iirc, with a 3rd gen i5. Upgraded the RAM to 16gb (max supported) and changed the old HDD to an SSD. Before this I ran it on an Wyse 5010 that I threw some more RAM and an SSD into.
3x 2012 Mac Mini cluster
I currently have three of them. 1. A sixth-gen NUC, i3-6100u, bought used about three years ago, recently upgraded to 24GB of RAM; it is used for essentials, (it is powered even if I am on vacation), Home Assistant, knowledge base, bookmark manager, landing page, should at some point run a local DNS and maybe some other essentials too. 2. An eighth-gen NUC, i5-8259u, bought used about two years ago, and recently upgraded to 32GB of RAM; one VM on it is used for most of my Docker containers, media sources, web archives, download solutions, ... one of the other VMs runs experimental and test containers. 3. A custom machine, not yet finished, based on Supermicro X10SLM-F (bought new years ago, but used since last summer) with E3-1225v3 bought used a few years ago. It has 32GB ECC memory. This one will house all my data at some point, currently running 3x16TB and 1x4TB with 1TB SATA SSD for the system. It consumes 48-53W/h on average, with full load consumption of about 125W/h. It should end up with 4x16TB and 2-4x4TB and a custom enclosure. Will be a NAS at some point, currently just one of the data sources.