I have a 42u rack with a poweredge r710 r720 and a md1200. Proxmox with ~40 VMs and containers. R710 runs freenas and it just holds back up snapshots of VMs.

I want to downsize. It’s too bulky. I live in an apartment. Carrying It up to the 3rd floor wasn’t something I ever wanna go through again and it doesn’t look natural in my room. Sticks out too far.

I’m running all the normal homelab stuff. Plex, docker, apache, nginx, pfsense, grafana, bitwarden, nextcloud, ansible, pihole, vscode server, kali and wazuh and a handful of other VMs.

I have 96gb ddr3 ecc right now and I’m using 76gb of it.

Looking at desktop cpus they only support 128gb. I’d like something up to 256gb so I don’t ever hit the cap since I’m pretty close. I don’t think I need ecc.

They also only have ~25 pcie lanes. My xeon has 40 pcie lanes and it’s a decade old.

I don’t know much about pcie lanes. Maybe 25 is enough? I’d want to have a quad port nic, maybe a 10gb sfp+ card, an onboard m.2 nvme drive and a nvme expansion card that holds 4 m.2 drives.

 

Are there any SFF options that aren’t enterprise grade or rack mounted? I want a mid tower or smaller that I can just put on my desk. Then I’m gonna sell my whole rack. I don’t need ipmi or idrac. They’re nice but I’ve logged into idrac like 5 times in the last 3 years.

  • SirLagz@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    If you don’t care/want/need new new new stuff, the old X299 chipsets with an i9-7980XE for example would give you 44 lanes with 128GB of RAM

    • whatamidoinghere009@alien.topOPBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      That’d probably be okay for a while but I always end up adding more services to my lab, and with 76gb currently used I don’t think it’d be long until I max out my memory usage. So I’m trying to build something with 256gb at the least so then I know I won’t need to upgrade for the next decade or longer.

  • DirtNomad@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’d look at Lenovos P620’s. It’s a threadripper pro cpu and you can stick up to 512gb ram in it. They’ve been around for a few years now, I got mine in 2021, so you may be able to find them cheap. Lenovo also has slightly smaller workstations that would manage all that but I think they’re pretty new so you’d be buying directly from them. Let me know if you have any questions about the p620. I have a 12 core with 128gb or ram and it’s a great home server and would run that workload just fine. Midtower case that’s really quiet.