I’ve been willing to get a Mini PC both for testing and other purposes (like hosting a Graylog, Unifi Controller and other stuff) and I’m wondering what hardware to choose in order to get a good balance between affordability and quality.
I’d like to be able to install a hypervisor on this machine so I can run any OS, make tests, connect some VMs on separate networks etc…
Would Xen Orchestra be a good choice for this?
Are there any Mini PCs that allow at least RAID 1? I might get two of those and setup a cluster too.
For raid 1 you just need to find you a mini PC that has enough SATA or NVMe slots for 2 drives. You’re going to do software raid anyway with xcpng. You can do proxmox as well. I alway recommend zfs if you are going to do raid. You can do zfs on xcpng but you will use the command line. Proxmox has everything you need for zfs out of the box.
Everyone has their own preference on which hypervisor they use and why. Going by your requirements you could go either way. Tom has some good videos on xcpng and XOA. You might take a look at some videos on proxmox and see if it fits your fancy.
Thanks a lot! That confirms what I thought. I still have to find a Mini PC with 2 slots. I’ll have to order online as no shop has that kind of hardware where I live
I’ll watch Tom’s videos again on both hypervisors, I remember liking XOA a bit more but I’ll check again, just to be sure!
For a couple months now I’ve been using a Minisforum NAB6 Mini PC and I’m quite happy with it. Since they come in a small case and pack a lot of components in a tight space, heat dissipation is very important. It also has active cooling for both the CPU and the SSD.
It’s running Proxmox VE and several VMs including OpnSense and a bunch of websites.
Personally I didn’t need raid 1 so can’t speak to that, but the rest of the hardware is pretty decent given the small form factor.
You might want to consider a desktop PC off ebay for cheap, one of the benefits of that is you could put in a quad port NIC which comes in handy if you want to use vlans, LAGGs etc. It’s likely that you can also add more RAM too if you are running VMs.
The Small Form Factor (SFF) desktops can be very quiet and often really cheap on the used market, they just take up more space than these mini-pc computers take. That said, if you get into a processor with a lot of cores, the cooling with an SFF might be a better choice than a mini. 10th gen Intel processors SFF should be at a lifecycle point, so you might be seeing these cheap, even some 12th gen might be at a lifecycle point. And we all know about the 13th and 14th gen stuff.
AMD might be a good choice to go with these days, was cheaper to buy, so cheaper second hand, and well, not as likely to burn themselves up.
I’ve also been thinking about it but I wanted to go as low as possible in power (and space) consumption Of course, depending on what I will want to run on it, a Mini-PC might not be enough.
It’s true that SFFs are a good middle-ground between Mini-PCs and desktops. It might be a good idea not to rule them out, and I guess I can find those locally too!
I agree that SFF gives some nice flexibility over Mini.
I’ve had great luck in this use case with both form factors in the following used system lines from eBay:
Elitedesk 800 SFF
1 NVMe, 2 x 3.5" SATA, 1 x 2.5 SATA up to 64GB RAM
ability to add more NVMe via PCIe adapters
Elitedesk 800 Mini
1 NVMe, 1 SATA, up to 32GB RAM
(I’m using 800 G3 series but would recommend going newer for better CPU)
Both are running i5 CPUs and have plenty of power for my homelab needs while using very low power.
I started with low end mini PCs (Beelink) but had them fail shortly after a year. These HPs have been a great replacement.
What I like about the SFF is it allows me to add a lot more storage in the form of multiple NVMe’s and 2 full size 3.5 HDDs for NAS. Those drives are available so large these days there’s no need for a big RAID Z volume. I just go RAID 1. For the hypervisor OS I install on a single NVMe and use a pair of additional NVMe’s mirrored and partitioned for dedicated flash storage and also cache/special/slog for the ZFS 7k mirror. It’s a little complex but a great hybrid performance setup.
On the Mini’s, as shared it’s more work to get to a RAID 1 for the OS and storage but is possible. If you get a pair of Mini’s you could consider no RAID on each and do replication between the two for potentially better availability. In my experience those Mini’s are not as robust, and storage is not my primary concern for failure. But on the other hand ZFS RAID 1 affords integrity protection and healing that a single drive cannot provide.
I’m looking into this myself, my lab is 4 HP DL360 gen8 servers, power and heat are a big deal if I have to move them home. And I may have to move them home as things may be changing and I’m unhappy here. Trying to think about exactly how much CPU and RAM I really needfor this, and find a nice quiet and low power way for Truenas to run. And do this all without spending a fortune. I’d really like 8 cores (16 threads) but cost might be too high. Even 4c/8t stuff is more than I want to spend. I’ll have to see how this shakes out in the end.
