Mini Proxmox

Mini NAS with Proxmox

This build was an attempt at a:

Minimal Physical Space
Power Efficiency
Performance
Cost

I used the onboard NIC with a managed switch and "Tagged" VLAN IDs into a couple of subnets where different VMs reside. I'm running 4 instances of Ubuntu Server for security camera recordings, general file storage, backups (UrBackups) and DNS sink hole (AdGuard Home). None of these require much in regards of compute resources (memory/cpu).

For this reason, the 8500G seems like a nice fit to balance performance, price and efficiency. Nothing special was configured with Proxmox and I have not explored any passthrough features yet with exception of passing a few mechanical drives to the security camera VM. At idle with (2) 7200 rpm 3.5" drives the power draw is ~42 watts. Without the mech drives it rest at 35 idle. In operation...it still generally rest in the low 45's with small bumps when the cache write to the mech drives spawns an actual write (all measured with a Kilo-A-Watt meter).

If you want a small business/home server, with the option to host larger VMs that isn't terribly expensive or power hungry, this isn't a bad setup. You can certainly host my current 24/7 VMs on a much less capable system with no perceivable performance difference, but everything is a case of what-ifs, present circumstances and just having fun playing with new stuff. Power wise with x86 desktop systems, ATX boards, standard PSU's...this one runs about as light as any of them at idle. There are mini PC's that use a lot less power, but then you are generally using USB mass storage and lack a PCIe slot for expansion, which in my case, this was not acceptable. I am actually replacing a NUC that was currently using an external 8TB USB 3.0 drive and this ended up being a not so great solution for 24/7 camera recordings, it works but barely when dealing with 8+ 4k cameras and also needing to do remote playback.

I hope this helps for those looking for information as a mini server. So far, no issues.