[j45]

For homelab or self hosting, Power per watt is my favourite measure now.

Depending on your need (many apps just idle most of the time) a usff pc can make an excellent proxmox server.

Check out a Lenovo m920q, Dell Optiplex 7060, HP EliteDesk or ProDesk 800 series. They are easy enough to bump to 64G of ram and stack up as you need. The 8700T cpu is a desktop grade in a small shell and watt footprint and also has vpro and hyperthreading.

It’s not a rack server but it’s easy enough to add a Mac Studio/Mini soon enough for crunching.

I have spent too much time with full rack server gear and using it a can seem like a matter of preference before need. It’s heavy, hungry, noisy, and my better half didn’t like when I brought the leftover data centre stuff home.

The USFF boxes are near silent and sip electricity.

[PuffinBlue]

Those are very good options. I considered those for a 3 node proxmox cluster.

In the end I went with HP t630's. They're much less powerful, but they're also much cheaper and very small! Dell Wyse 3040 or 5060's are also fantastic options. I liked the t630 because it has a proper sata SSD slot and will take up to 64GB RAM. The power bricks are also quite small too.

I'm going to use mine as a home lab testing environment for cluster learning. I'm curious what kind of performance I can get by placing 3 kubernetes nodes on each and spreading out the workload across the differnt devices.

[j45]

Thank you as well for those recommendations. I was looking for some lighter powered and serviceable servers.

As time goes on, for the sake of portability, it seems useful to have one appliance dedicated to the physical house, one for personal/family, and then to the extent of hobby or playing with tech, higher powered servers are useful.

I have been trying to stay with Intel 64 bit to keep things easy but will probably get dragged back towards arm and 32 bit.

Edit: more typos than hn should allow

[Gigachad]

The M1 Mac mini with linux will probably end up being the best self hosting hardware.

[j45]

Agreed. Support for packages is improving but still not seamless.

Can ram still be upgraded in Mac minis?

The m2 Mac mini is a workhorse. Exciting times.

[Gigachad]

They can't be upgraded as its on the SoC. But if you are buying them new, you can just max it out initially. Asahi linux is pretty much complete for server use cases. The majority of what's missing is thunderbolt, suspend, video decoders, all stuff you don't need on a server.

Probably the main issue you will run in to is funding ARM docker images, usually you have to rebuild them yourself.

[j45]

The cost of maxing out a mini from Apple typically puts it at least double the cost in a computational power per watt model.

It might be feasible to but 2 or 3 usffs to cover one max mini at a fraction of the cost, or stick the mini to doing only certain tasks on 8 or 16gb.

Since the m1 addresses memory differently less ram should go further, but I’m not sure if those efficiencies extend to virtualized machines.

I’ll try to dig up an old spreadsheet and add the the m1’s and m2’s stack up to the above.

The arm docker image is a real deterrent. Forums have more and more workarounds and tweaks so hopefully they’ll become available as time goes on. It’s often not worth fighting with compiling.