What are people running for low power virtualization hosts now?

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ChRoNo16

[H]ard|Gawd
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Im mainly interested to know hardware wise, but software too.

I can install and run Vmware esxi (Who cant?) and thats fine, ive had trouble figureing out other hypervisor replacements.

I need low power, ideally an ok thread count for cpus, and good ammount of ram.

any ideas that wont break the bank? Used desktop systems maybe?
 
ChRoNo16 said:
Im mainly interested to know hardware wise, but software too.

I can install and run Vmware esxi (Who cant?) and thats fine, ive had trouble figureing out other hypervisor replacements.

I need low power, ideally an ok thread count for cpus, and good ammount of ram.

any ideas that wont break the bank? Used desktop systems maybe?
Click to expand...
Old AM2 systems with low-power athlon (APUs) might be good, check'em out. I have one running fanless in an itx box, but I'm not doing any hard work on it. It's hosting a smart-hub server (forget the name) right now, might also use it for my home cameras later -- dunno if it can handle that, though.
 
By my standards the 5900x is low power. I need 128 GB RAM on the host, so getting lower is not always easy.
 
I'm assuming this is for personal/home use?

Serve The Home often has articles and forum threads (including eBay/etc. deal finds) on repurposing slightly old mini/micro desktop systems (which are generally pretty efficient) for use in clusters.

As for hypervisors/platforms, Proxmox VE is nice and will run on just about anything Debian will (i.e., no dealing with VMWare's narrow HCL). About the only slight negative I can think of is that it has no native Docker support, only LXC (though you could simply spin up a VM guest to run Docker containers). There's also TrueNAS Scale, but that's probably more storage-focused and still very new.

If you can and haven't already, migrate as much as possible from full VM guests into containers (Docker, LXC, etc.). The overall hardware and power requirements for your setup would be sharply reduced.
 
Dell WYSE 5070, like 7 watt idle 15 watt load at the wall socket!
Upgraded with 32gigs of ram CT2K16G4SFD8213 and 2tb wd blue sata m.2 ssd WDS200T2B0B
On bios it came with, serv the home people report mix issues with high memory, works fine for me.
Plex transcode in gpu hardware works.
I don't daily the box, it's just in my go bag incase I need to bug out.
My usage for it when I need it is, plex, router, wifi.
I put ESX on it, 6.5 with "slipstreamed" network drivers. (6.7 and newer crashes) LMK if anyone wants more info on this. Not for everyone, doubt find anything lower power.
 
I ran 3 HP ProDesk's (600 G1's) in a 3-node Proxmox cluster for a while... then XCP-NG and then eventually moved to Hyper-V. They were all maxed with 32gb of ram each, and I popped in a dual port HP NC360T for multiple NIC's. Worked flawlessly for any hypervisor out there..
 
My boss (The wife) Says I have a $0 budget. so change of plans. i have a 2600x ryzen and 32 gig of ram for it. thoughts?

Also is there a way to keep it running at stock speed? going to be putting this in a case with 80mm fans.
 
If you are looking for lower power... you could possibly enable PBO and then choke it down a little bit with lower PPT setting
 
jlbenedict said:
I ran 3 HP ProDesk's (600 G1's) in a 3-node Proxmox cluster for a while... then XCP-NG and then eventually moved to Hyper-V. They were all maxed with 32gb of ram each, and I popped in a dual port HP NC360T for multiple NIC's. Worked flawlessly for any hypervisor out there..
Click to expand...
That's basically what I do, I have 3 1-liter PCs with 7500T CPUs picked up from eBay for like $130 apiece. The 7th gen is much cheaper as it can't run Windows 11. Added 16GB RAM to hit 24GB and both a 512GB SATA and NVMe SSD in ZFS RAID1, and use them in a Proxmox cluster. Very low power, take up less space than a hardback book, and essentially silent. Look for "tiny", "mini", or "micro" in the name, a YouTube channel has a whole series on them.

To restrict power on AM4 look for "ECO mode", or just set the PPT lower manually as jlbenedict said.
 
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