I run quite a bit on my home network, these are largely docker containers in a VM. Some examples are Home Assistant to control many aspects of my home and Mealie to hold delicious recipes. I run around 80 docker containers and a a few VMs. Each of these machines run just under $400 and are extremely fast considering.
Source: Amazon
All these run off of a couple of mini pcs running Proxmox. Proxmox is a very easy to use virtual machine system that has native clustering and failover. I run two mini pcs (AMD 5700U w/ 32G ram) along with a third device for a final quorum vote on a Raspberry Pi. The third device acts as a moderator to prevent both machines claiming control at the same time.
This system works fantastically, if I pull the plug on either of the devices that run VMs, the other will take control and start up all the machines in under 3 minutes.
I have been running close on ram, and I wanted to increase it. I saw no point in replacing the ram and buying DDR4 which will cost just as much as DDR5 with the ai craze. I decided to upgrade the two primary machines which will give me a lot more ram and 3-4 times more performance.
The primary reason I run mini pcs is because they are so energy efficient and it's just really cool to have all almost 100 machines running on a machine I can fit in my pocket.
The system I chose to replace it is the Minisforum MS-A2, a mini workstation that has an extremely fast CPU, can hold 3 NVME drives, 96GB of ram, and dual 10Gbit SFP+.
The total system cost is just over $1,300. Considerably more expensive than my previous mini pcs, but the 10Gbit SFP+ is a big seller for me and the much faster CPU.
While I had zero performance issues despite running a crazy amount of docker containers, this will be a massive upgrade in terms of CPU performance at a significant power increase.
The big advantage of my previous setup as each machine generally used 10W-30W, most of the time under 15W.
This is a chart of the energy consumption over the 2-3 days prior to taking it offline. Here is a chart of the secondary node.
While this machine isn't actively running any virtual machines, it does keep the ZFS file system in sync with the primary device so it can fail over quickly and without a restore.
If you are curious, these charts are from my Home Assistant instance that I have smart outlets on most of my hardware and can pull data from any day or second in the last 4 years.
So what about my new systems? Unfortunately I could only get one, the ram is very hard to get and it will take about a week to get another DDR5 96GB set sent over. For now I am using my EVO-X2 which is very similar performance (about 95% as fast) and even has 128G of shareable ram. I was using this for AI, but I have new hardware coming in that is much much faster.
I accidentally got a very short DAC cable that won't allow me to use 10gbit until the new one comes in. I did get some high end thermal paste to repaste the CPU as these machines can have thermal issues at full speed.
Installation is not as easy I would like but still only took a few minutes.
Installing the NVME drive was the easiest part. I didn't have to remove a single screw outside of the nvme set screw. The case actually slides off with a single button press. This is a Gen 4 2TB nvme. I don't use a ton of space, only about 120-130g of space. Anything super large is generally stored on my NAS.
Installing ram involved removing 3 screws and slotting them in.
Finally I removed the heat sink which was another 3 screws and cleaned it off. I only removed the thermal paste on the CPU and applied Frost X45 thermal paste, considered one of the best thermal paste available right now. 15.2w/m-k is considerable higher than typical 8.5w/m-k thermal paste and even the higher end 12w/m-k thermal paste. Because this device is in such a small case and is nearly as fast as a $800 AMD 9950X, I wanted to have the best paste you can get without going liquid metal.
After everything came together, I installed Proxmox and rebuilt a new three node cluster.
I have a second machine on order and should have it in a week hopefully.
While i had no complaints of the old system, it ran surprisingly well, there is a noticeable response time improvement when doing backup/restore and loading apps. It is all micro seconds, but it is noticeable.
Now I can check out my recipes and decide what I want for dinner.
I will likely use one of the old machines as a new backup workstation if anything goes wrong with my primary and sell or give away the second.
