Hello everyone,
I started my journey in the homelab world few months ago, though I got strong computer knowledge prior to this passion.
I got a few pcs running at home that include but are not limited to :- personal computers- work computers (I do video editing at home)- A synology nas that contains most personal and work data- a raspi that I use for streaming games & movies from jellyfin to a projector- A Fujitsu S920 thinclient that runs few dockers containers 24/7 including Pihole, etc (im assuming it to be safer and really power efficient)- And another S920 that is currently used as my OPNSense router (I threw away my ISP router)
The thing is that I’m currently running most of my services (30/40 light services except storage) on a overkill spare computer I got that runs few proxmox VMs. And the electricity bill is just indecent (EU citizen here), plus I’m not really confortable with using powerful gear for simple tasks, while I can use a lighter pc to do the same job while keeping room for the future.
This way, I came upon the famous google sheet (can’t find it right now) that sort CPU by power efficiency, and thus got interested in finding an Optiplex 3500 (in its Small Factor Form) with an i5 7500, 8gb of ram, and a 256gb nvme ssd. Supposed to run really really low on electricity.
My goal is to reduce as much as possible the number of different devices, so I was planning to upgrade the ram to 32gb and make a proxmox host from this Optiplex, virtualize TrueNAS, pass to it a PCIe sata card with my nas drives, and run my services on other proxmox debian VMs.
In the future, I may would like to add a 10gbps NIC + SSD caching to it, in order to be able to work from the NAS part of it, and maybe virtualize opnsense and run my whole stack in the same device to gain even much in power & efficiency.
Is it not enough to fit my needs? ECC memory support apart, is it a viable solution ? I found a lot of people asking about this specific computer, but their use cases were always really different/lighter than mine. If not, may you have any advice or reco on cheap second hand stuff that could handle this, while being power-efficient and future-proof ?
Thanks by advance, and sorry if this post was a mess !
EDIT: I forgot to say, but I really really really don’t care about the room inside, cause I will probably mod a case for it. Im only talking about the electronic stuff.
I know you are planning to use your NAS for storage.
But I doubt I would be happy using Gbe for VM’s. Is this the point to plunge into 10Gbe?
Or other direction could be having storage local actually on the Optiplex but USFF/SFF very limited capacity to hold drives… If going that direction could transplant the Optiplex into a server chassis, but that would add costs.
Here is my config. I use the i5-7500 and can say that it’s pretty good. It’s in the main node of my proxmox cluster that hosts my NAS VM and main Docker instance with lots of containers. Average power consumption is about 65-70W.
I started out with just this node as a standalone server so it has everything. I got a FD Define R5 case because it can hold lots of drives. Define R7 is recommended too. R6 isn’t because its generation is the only one using its own HDD trays (IIRC). Overall, they are the best NAS tower cases. Sound-proofed and every HDD is mounted with gromets. I use a Seasonic Focus PSU because they come with a lot of HDD power connections out of the box and I don’t need to daisy-chain.
This is the 4th iteration of this machine and the item I’ve carried over since v1 is the HBA. (RAID card in IT mode). It removes the requirement of the MB to have a high amount of SATA connections. The whole card is passed through in my NAS VM.
What I’m planning to do is to add a NIC. Not sure 4x1GbE or 2x10GbE. Or maybe both. With them, the power usage might go in the mid 80s but that’s fine for a machine that can be a hypervisor, a docker server, a NAS and a network appliance all in one. The downside is that if you reboot it, you lose the network for a while.
Additionally, I got two Lenovo Tiny 920q that run my experimental stuff. They are purely for compute and for HA failover in case the main node fails.
I use 3050/3070 micros a lot. They are very useful and capable machines for hosting. I have one that has been up for the better part of a year running proxmox with 5-6 different vms/lxc’s running on it.