MiniPC vs Servers in the Home Lab in 2024

[@igorshubovych]

It would be cool if some of this cheaper brands can release something like HPE MicroServer, the middle ground between mini PC and server.

[@hotrodhunk7389]

And here I'm just using two e waste laptops...

[@c0p0n]

Whatever works 👍

[@Anuitu2u]

My Dell Latitude E7440 consume 60 watts, when I gauge it using a smart plug. What laptop you use? In my ideal home lab, a server idle power consumption should be under 30 or less. My dream machine right now is an HP elitebook G3 mini with Intel 9th gen T series processor, but I need 2 Ethernets, so it's a dilemma.

[@craig30985]

I'm using my dad's old 7th gen pentium laptop for 1 year and have not had any issues so far.

[@brianhecimovich4488]

Laptops have a built in battery backup 🫡

[@esehombre2580]

Dawg, that's nothing to be ashamed of. When I started out, I had my Proxmox pc running 24/7. It's a Ryzen 7 3700X, 32gb, 2 SSD, 2 HDD, 850W badass, running idle until I'd decide to actually use it. I still got it, but nowadays I just run a Minisforum N100 mini pc for Plex and Jellyfin. If two laptops are enough for your use case, they're enough.

[@bitpickersplace494]

I moved from a Dell R730 server to the MiniForums MS-01 last week. While I love my Dell, power usage was just too much. I watch both videos on the MS-01 and the Trigkey S7 mini PC's . I went with the MS-01 because of the networking capabilities. I got the I-9 processor and 32GB of memory. In my testing, I ran Windows 11 and a Debian machine with a desktop along with about five other linux server vm's. Remote Desktop accessed both the Windows vm and Debian Desktop nlike a dream. Much better than the Dell server did. Now, it MiniForums would produce an AMD version of MS-01 mini with a high end Ryzen processor, they would have a perfect machine. As it is, I've very happy with the change. All I have to do is to find a buyer for my Dell.

[@bibekkhatri]

How many minisforum machines are you using? I want to build a homelab for learning purposes. Do u think just one minisforum PC will suffice?

[@bitpickersplace494]

@@bibekkhatri I’m only using one for Proxmox. I have a second, slightly lower end one that I am using as an Emby video server. At this point in my life, It’s just a hobby. I was a developer and now that I’m retired, I “play” with networking and servers. For what I’m doing, this works just fine and the power usage for both is far less the R730. The VM’s I have run sql server, Maria DB, Home Assistant, Windows 11 when needed, Ubuntu Desktop when needed and anything else I get an urge to try. All of the machines are small. No massive drive sizes. They don’t pull a heavy, constant load. The Emby server just does video processing for movies. The movies are stored on a Synology NAS.

[@charlesrussell9188]

Depending on location i might be interested in in your 730.

[@bitpickersplace494]

@@charlesrussell9188 Thornton. Colorado. I’m not going to mess with trying to ship, but if you are local ….

[@zyghom]

Although I agree with everything you said, I am wondering why you are putting the title: "... in Home Lab..." yet you talk entrprice solutions. Is this video a comparison between home and enterprice? or was it supposed to be: "what to use in Home Lab?" - if the latter then you should have skipped unnecessary description of what companies use - the audience here is home users. Unless I am wrong ;-)

[@geekinasuit8333]

See my earlier comment on what I'm doing at home with the miniPC. I also run multiple cloud servers for a private business, these are "enterprise" grade systems. The home lab deals with R&D work (both business and personal), and some of the R&D results will be rolled out into production on the cloud systems.

[@Spractral]

No fluff. I appreciate these sort of videos; this is what the internet used to be. Thank you!

[@VirtualizationHowto]

@Spractral thank you!

[@ewenchan1239]

It REALLY depends on what you're running. My main Proxmox load average right is somewhere around 18-20 (out of a 32-core/64-thread system) (and also has 256 GB of DDR4-2400 ECC Reg RAM). To do the same with the MS-01, I would need four of them, and even the, one of one of them might be able to fit my RTX A2000 6 GB GPU in there, whilst another would have to take my 100 Gbps Infiniband NIC. And my main Proxmox server also manages 36 HDDs, which the MS-01 won't really be able to do, unless another one of the four that I would need to get, would then take the SAS RAID card, and then I would connect that up to a disk shelf, to be able to physically host the data, and it is unlikely that the disk shelf would be any more power efficient. Therefore; as you can see, when you add it all up, having four MS-01s might still not be the best option despite it's capabilities as a mini PC server. (I think that at last count, I was running something like 23 LXC containers, and I'm now down to about 5 or 6 VMs (as more Linux VMs are being migrated over to LXC containers).) It'll be some time before Mini PCs would be able to displace my main Proxmox server as modern desktop and laptop CPUs don't have enough PCIe lanes for all of the add-in cards that I am running.

[@kristopherleslie8343]

Agreed

[@kristopherleslie8343]

But they are slightly cheaper if you just wanna learn with lower power

[@ewenchan1239]

@@kristopherleslie8343 Again, it depends on what you are trying to do. My main, dual Xeon E5-2697A v4 Proxmox server was only something like $1150 when I bought it. Hard drives came from the other 4 NAS servers that I already had at the time, so they were free to me, but this will ALWAYS be the case of it depends on what it is that you're doing or trying to do, what is your budget, and what hardware you are currently in possession of that you can re-use/re-purpose? If the answer is everything, not much to speak of, and nothing (because everybody has to start from SOMEWHERE), then there are a LOT of low(er) budget options that exists now, that didn't exist before. My three OASLOA Mini PCs which has the Intel N95 processor in it, I bought them a little while ago at $154 USD a piece. In other words, if price is a top priority, then you can buy relatively inexpensive PCs these days. (And I actually computed the Price/(Performance/Watt) metric to arrive at this decision as there were cheaper options, but less performant, and more expensive options, that were more performant, but also could potentially cost significantly more than $154, and everything in between. It runs the whole gamut.) Said OASLOA Mini PCs also idle at somewhere between 6-8 W a piece, and at full load, I can barely push it above 15 W, even running a parallel sparse matrix solver. And there are times, where if you are willing to spend a little bit more, then you can get that jump in performance, but you're also needing to spend more to be able to get that. If you can swing it, great. If not, then you are, more or less, relegated to what's affordable. (Again, also how I ended up with a trio of $154 Mini PCs, despite having a Proxmox server with 256 GB of RAM, two AMD Ryzen 9 5950X compute nodes for my micro HPC cluster, 100 Gbps Infiniband network/system interconnect, etc.) (A trio of the Minisforum MS-01 would have costed me about $2487 USD vs. the $462 USD that I spent on the trio of OASLOA Mini PCs. Yes, the Minisforum MS-01 would've been SIGNIFICANTLY more performant, but it would've also costed at least 5X more. And for Windows AD DC, DNS, and Pi-hole (which became AdGuardHome), I don't need the MS-01 to be able to do that.)

[@kristopherleslie8343]

Learning then just mini. I’ve been down that road. Have an entire data center worth of servers just sitting here collecting dust. :)

[@ewenchan1239]

@@kristopherleslie8343 Agreed.

[@TrTai]

I ended up just picking up an MS-01 with some intent to probably downsize my whole rack. I have a full enterprise grade setup of Cisco Servers that I managed to get fairly cheaply (not counting my time hunting down some additional parts to get exactly what I wanted) and that's awesome for when I'm working with things work related. But with the recent heat wave, I had to turn them all off except my even older Dell managing my storage, makes the mini-pcs more attractive. I really hope now that I've picked up this one, we get more MS-01 like devices, because even outside of the homelab, they're super versatile for their footprint and power, one more x8 slot and some more memory and it would be essentially perfect for me.

[@scotttrongkaew]

For Out-Of-Band Management, Mini PC like Dell and HP Lenovo are built in with vPro Technology (with i5 or higher) which allow IT admin to manage and control machine under the bios such as a power on system and I guess Mini Forums do so, It could be replace the choice for choose mini pc instead of server.

[@powertoker5000]

The electricity I use for my server directly goes to keeping my basement dry in addition to the computational capacity

[@vikasv9687]

I don't understand where is this video coming from but there's no comparison. Both are for different purpose and environment.

[@gregorydelapierre582]

It really boils down to the technology you want to learn and where you host your lab, and of course the budget you want to allocate.

[@cedwardsmedia]

I currently have three Poweredge servers in a rack in my lab. I'm actually considering changing their roles around. Planning to add a few mini-pcs to the lab to handle most containers and VM tasks and leave the servers to true "server" tasks. My TrueNAS machine will be getting a huge storage and RAM upgrade soon so it'll stay on true server hardware. Another server is handling VMware while another handles containers. These tasks will likely be moved to mini machines. I think a hybrid setup is best for almost anyone. That way you can have a true server while not breaking the bank.

[@robotredkitten817]

Thanks for that video. I am looking for a mini PC I think. I'm a bit a nerd for arm and risk-V cpu. What do you think would be the best home server with a risk-V or maybe a arm possessor?

[@ryanmalone2681]

Mini PC's are great unless you're really running services and then RAM is the biggest issue. I got a Linux Mint VM, Win11 VM, and +10 containers and ran out of memory but had plenty of CPU left. I need to be able to run 50 containers and about 20 VMs, so it's not practical. I wanted to run a Proxmox cluster which mean it would need to handle a failover so I'd need a ton of them. I also really like having redundant everything in servers too. Tried it and it was a big mistake. Mini Pc won't go to waste though because it sucks as a server platform but it's great otherwise.

[@ZenRebel33]

The one question I have is storage. What are you doing storage? External?

[@html1143]

It honestly depends on your use case. If you plan on running extremely intensive services in your network/homelab than getting a traditional server may suit your needs. However if you are just starting out a raspberry pi or dell optiplex is great way to start running some services. I currently have a raspberry pi that I run a couple of docker containers for a homepage dashboard, pihole, minecraft bedrock server, and a couple of local apache servers and it is very low power running 24/7. You don't need an enterprise server for running just a couple of services. I do however want to get a dell poweredge r620 in the future to run esxi on.

[@Trains-With-Shane]

It is worth mentioning that Proxmox is working diligently on support for intel's "Big Little" architecture. It already mostly works from what I understand so this makes them an even more compelling argument as opposed to used enterprise gear. The power savings of a mini PC is excellent as you really don't lost much versatility if you don't need banks of 3.5" hard drives for massive storage. Now that being said another plus to enterprise gear is that the initial buy in is inexpensive but replacement and upgrade parts are as well. If something stops working on any of these mini PC's it's likely going to necessitate replacement of the entire unit.

[@mkhanapathan]

I have gone the other way from having a semi-mini server to a Dell R730 that I have worked to power optimise. With 1 x Xeon E5-2697 v4 cpu and 128gb ram with 8xDC800 ssd's and a Quadro P2000 card, everything runs at 112W with proxmox, pfsense, unifi controller, truenas,plex and with Windows 11 it humms along at 124W. With 2 x Xeon E5-2660 v4 installed the same setup runs at 140W. The stock fans are quiet using a ipmi control script from truenas forum and the network switch fans are what is the loudest in the room and even they are barely a humm.

[@kazmir_]

Very informative, thanks for this comment. Might do something like this until I can afford a Microserver.

[@KeilorT]

Great video. Another common limitation is the lack of RAID. That’s a must!

[@mistaox]

This!..Thats why I plan to replace most of my compute rack with Minis but keep a few servers for storage.

[@SeanSR]

I have a beelink ser5 pro with a 5800h and 32 gb of ram running proxmox. I have 4 vm's running with 4 core and 6gb of ram and this thing is amazing. I run emby and some game servers with 7 days to die and ark survival ascended. I replaced my old HP z800. This mini pc is amazing and i've had no problems other than you cant install esxi on a realtek nic. I used esxi on the HP but had to switch to proxmox for the mini pc cause it has said realtek nic. Importing my VM from vmware to proxmox was so simple with the new import wizard proxmox has.

[@tendosingh5682]

It pays when you don't have e cores to screw things up.

[@SeanSR]

@@tendosingh5682 what?

[@praetorxyn]

My long term plan is to get a MS-01 to use as a Proxmox host, and eventually to put in a rack and build a rack server, or maybe just get a 45Drives HL15, to use as a storage server with TrueNAS Scale, with proper 10G switches and such to make the most of both. Hopefully I can limp along with my Synology NAS until then.

[@howardleen4182]

Solid video idea - I'll be watching this later.

[@frauseo]

To be honest, mini pc are awesome… but sff pc just offer more versatility for more advanced user. So I just upgraded from a gmktec m5 to a hp elite 600 sff g9.

[@alecwoon6325]

Horizontal scaling (i.e. clustering) in most cases, would overcome MiniPC’s memory limitation. Since HA is preferable for server environment anyway, MiniPCs makes sense to save power. Best part is that you can scale gradually as your capacity requirement grows, rather than investing all infrastructure and paying for power upfront.

[@tommybronze3451]

a quick note on ms-01 a great machine! I’ve downsized my cluster a lot with just a 3 of those and power went waaay down while performance increased a lot. Now, to save on power I would advise replacing vm’s with containers - proxmox CT’s are a breeze and do work ok with HA storage types. Only reason to run a VM in my mind is a non linux os that ee try to run / extra secure containment - which most ordinary people don’t really need (exception being running a hass, pfsense/opensense and maybe public web server). And yes an ms01 style mini pc with amd ryzen would be a killer choice !

[@Dan-ro6nj]

Has it been stable for you? People have been reporting random shutdown issues when running Proxmox host on MS-01.

[@tommybronze3451]

@@Dan-ro6nj I had one issue when for maybe a week there were randome kernel panics. Every time I rebooted the machine and problem persisted. A hard power off for 20 seconds and problem haven’t reoccurred since. Edit: but this was just one machine out of few.

[@Dan-ro6nj]

@@tommybronze3451 i see, thanks. still unsure if I want to go for it, plenty people having problems

[@JasonsLabVideos]

I still love my Lenovo St550 with dual scalale xeon cpu's. Can't get 256gigs ram and tons of storage in a small box. Good video Brandon ..

[@g.s.3389]

personally I have 2 esxi server, one on a miniPC AMD with many docker and few vm, while the other is a used workstation dual processor XEON where I have an NVIDIA card and where I virtualize high demanding workloads.

[@SB-qm5wg]

One problem I've seen with consumer PC parts, even if ECC is supported, it doesn't actually use the parity function. Just means it's works. And no IPMI.

[@jeffnew1213]

Wow, this is timely!

[@geekinasuit8333]

I bought a Mini PC with an AMD Ryzen 8c/16t CPU. It has 64Gb RAM, 2Tb NVMe storage (I can add a second NVMe card), and 4 Ethernet ports. I've connected 2 Eth ports for external access, and 2 for my internal LAN. It's running 2 dozen or so LXC containers, and can easily run 2 dozen more. It's quiet and takes up a lot less space than my AsrockRack server, but the Asrock server has 16c/32t CPU, 40Tb storage (32Tb RAID 5), and 128Gb RAM, so not quite the same thing. I use the miniPC as an Internet gateway server. The Asrock is for my home lab and storage system. The miniPC keeps Internet access working when doing experiments and maintenance on the Asrock server, and it can take over the role of the miniPC gateway server when I'm doing maintenance and experiments on the minPC, it’s really nice to have the easily swappable redundancy.

[@user-gt1jo8go7c]

What's the name of this mini pc

[@geekinasuit8333]

@@user-gt1jo8go7c Purchased from Amazon: 4 LAN i226 2.5GbE LAN Firewall Mini PC AMD Ryzen 7 5800U, Internal 8010 Fan, 4*USB, HDMI, DP, Type-C, TF, 4K Display, Ethernet AES-NI VPN Router PC, Openwrt, Micro Appliance, 64GB DDR4 2TB NVMe Brand: KingnovyPC

[@tdragon87]

I just gotta ask. Did you experience any issues with your MS-01? Mine keeps freezing, no errors, nothing. Required hard reset. Now got a "test" bios update from Minisforum to try out. Not enough time to come to a conclusion. My config with as much info is: Updated Microcode and latest Proxmox updates 13900H 96GB Cruacial CT2K48G56C46S5 ZFS Raid 1 with 2 x WD SN700 Booting VMs of NFS Got SR-IOV on the two 10GB nics Running both containers and VMs

[@jonathan.sullivan]

VPro is a thing and PiKVM as well. I've run 128 Core Monster servers in my homelab and now I'm downsizing to more power efficient alternatives where possible. Whether it's a NUC cluster or MS-01 that's all the rage these days.

[@moonlightsoldier8443]

Yeah depends on use case to me personally my homelap when complete will be a gaming pc a server I'm going to deckout for ai crypto and rendering then a Nas for software development and my laptop

[@hubstrangers3450]

Thank you....

[@demorez5]

for me the real issue with mini pcs is that there is no way to cramp in 40+ TB of storage. yeah, i could get a separate Synology NAS, but then costs are up incredibly

[@EbrahimHasan]

SFF (not USFF) workstations fill a sweet spot for me.

[@kristopherleslie8343]

If I recall correctly I think a Chinese shop got past that limitation on memory. I think they hacked 128 Gb

[@AleksejsKovalovs]

Why do someone need more than 64GB RAM in homelab??

[@VirtualizationHowto]

@AleksejsKovalovs I have been running 5 servers with 128 GB of RAM each and still need more :) Lots of VMs and testing requires lots of RAM.

[@JazzTechie]

I play around with distributed systems and currently have ~200 GB ram. I could certainly run it on less ram, but running queries on huge amounts of data would return results slower than molasses.

[@AleksejsKovalovs]

@@VirtualizationHowto Why do you need so much VMs at home? What are you testing? You make a new VM for each docker container?

[@AleksejsKovalovs]

@@JazzTechie huge amounts of data at home? What kind of data?

[@tendosingh5682]

Just run ryzen to avoid efficiency cores issues.

[@vikasv9687]

Informative but i don't see a need of comparison here. Maybe threadripper and dual Xeon could be compaired. Mini pc are for fun nothing serious.

[@annebokma4637]

Wish mini PC's came with 2x 10g rj45

[@MacGyver0]

I don't know why but my comment was deleted. Is this some policy or what?

[@MacGyver0]

Not going to repeat, who wants the third option - it's possible to build DIY home server, and the key is H13SAE-MF

[@GustavoMsTrashCan]

Orange pi zero 3: *laughs in 1W