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I've been thinking about upgrading my current "homelab" (just an old PC), and I've been waiting for a small form factor with an integrated power supply and a bu

I've been thinking about upgrading my current "homelab" (just an old PC), and I've been waiting for a small form factor with an integrated power supply and a bunch of NVMe slots. Does that exist yet?

buybackoff 3y ago
For my homelab, I bought OptiPlex 7000 with 3 NVMe slots (one PCIe 4.0, one 3.0, one 3.0 short 2242), 1 PCI x16, 1 PCI x4, 3 SATA and 3 DisplayPorts for 300 EUR near 2 years ago. It was so good actually that I've made it my main PC. I already had 3 monitors and this SFF just worked fine with them. No games of course. I also have Precision Tower with Xeon/64GB ECC RAM and 1 native NVMe slot. I use PCI-to-NVMe adapters there (2 slots), it works well with ZFS mirror.
- Andrex 3y ago
  OptiPlex seemed to be the best option when I was browsing around.
jhickok 3y ago
I think you could DIY that, but I found getting a few little PCs can be stuffed in a drawers with some holes drilled in the back. Haven't complained about suffocation yet! I bought some Bee-Link mini PCs with pretty impressive specs. No idea if I am now being spied on by China.
CharlesW 3y ago
> …I've been waiting for a small form factor with an integrated power supply and a bunch of NVMe slots. Does that exist yet? Have you considered using a NAS as your homelab? I run a few containers (no VMs yet, although I can) and just do that on my QNAP. The TBS-h574TX (https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/tbs-h574tx https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/tbs-h574tx) has five E1.S/M.2 slots. The HS-453DX-8G has two SATA 3.5-inch drive bays and two M.2 2280 SATA SSD slots (https://www.qnap.com/en/product/hs-453dx https://www.qnap.com/en/product/hs-453dx), and the TBS-h574TX. Or you can just throw SATA SSDs into any NAS.
- buybackoff 3y ago
  It's easier to turn an OptiPlex into NAS. Actually you could pass-through entire SATA stack as a PCI device into TruNAS running in Proxmox VM so it sees SATA ports natively, with all goodies such as SMART.
  - znpy 3y ago
    If you just need to run a few containers, you might want to take a look at TrueNas (Scale) rather than Proxmox.
    - belthesar 3y ago
      Depending on the use case, this is definitely an option. I personally prefer using Proxmox under my Container Orchestration hardware because, as it seems to always eventually do, my home lab has become production, and being able to do software patches of the underlying system without service outages is really desirable. I've been agonizing and going back and forth between various potential solutions for this for a couple months now, with the most recent attempt being "Deploy k3s, with a fully separate control plane from the worker nodes, and run all of those atop a Proxmox cluster because being able to migrate VMs across nodes and also stand up isolated workloads to test out other solutions makes changing things in the future far less risky". That said, I was running the Homelab on effectively a single Unraid hyperconverged NAS/compute layer before then, and that worked wonders for quite a long time. I wouldn't consider Unraid my first choice now, given the advancements in TrueNAS SCALE in the time since I chose it as the solution, but the concept of NAS + Container Orchestrator as hyperconverged homelab today is quite attractive.
      - justinclift 3y ago
        > ... being able to do software patches of the underlying system without service outages is really desirable. Yeah, that's what I was looking at Proxmox (8.x) for recently as well, but it never made it through basic qualification testing. VM migration's would randomly hang forever about 25% of the time. Definitely not a case of bad network interconnect either. :( I'm using Ryzen 5000 series cpus on all the test gear though, and recently saw a mention that it may have been a known problem that's fixed. But not super keen on wasting more time. What sort of cpus are your hosts using, and are you using your VMs with Ceph as their storage? :)
natebc 3y ago
Maybe give this thing a look? it's newish and a little expensive but pretty dang well equipped. (not internally powered though) https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-ms-01 https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-ms-01
- jay-saint 3y ago
  After massively overthinking things for my homelab / firewall, I am ordering one this weekend, just deciding which cpu.
- buybackoff 3y ago
  It's a mobile CPU (with H). Unless it's fanless it will sound like a rocket lunch. Or it will be thermal-throttled with any sustained load. And it looks too expensive.
unregistereddev 3y ago
There are SFF PC's with integrated power supplies that have a few PCIe slots. PCIe -> NVME adapters are readily available (not my website or article, but posting a link to a review site seemed more genuine than posting Newegg or Amazon links to specific products): https://thunderboltlaptop.com/best-nvme-pcie-adapters/ https://thunderboltlaptop.com/best-nvme-pcie-adapters/
- buybackoff 3y ago
  The cheapest from Amazon works well. Just make sure it matches PCI Gen and slot overall for throughput, e.g. PCI 3.0 x4 are fine for NVMe 3.0, but for NVMe 4.0 more is needed.
justinclift 3y ago
For the "bunch of NVMe slots", the OWC PCIe NVMe adapters look interesting: * https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-4m2 https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-4m2 (4x NVMe drives) * https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-8m2 https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-8m2 (8x NVMe drives) I'd personally get them without drives included, as the OWC drives seem pretty expensive.

I've been thinking about upgrading my current "homelab" (just an old PC), and I've been waiting for a small form factor with an integrated power supply and a bunch of NVMe slots. Does that exist yet?

buybackoff 3y ago

For my homelab, I bought OptiPlex 7000 with 3 NVMe slots (one PCIe 4.0, one 3.0, one 3.0 short 2242), 1 PCI x16, 1 PCI x4, 3 SATA and 3 DisplayPorts for 300 EUR near 2 years ago. It was so good actually that I've made it my main PC. I already had 3 monitors and this SFF just worked fine with them. No games of course. I also have Precision Tower with Xeon/64GB ECC RAM and 1 native NVMe slot. I use PCI-to-NVMe adapters there (2 slots), it works well with ZFS mirror.

Andrex 3y ago
OptiPlex seemed to be the best option when I was browsing around.

jhickok 3y ago

I think you could DIY that, but I found getting a few little PCs can be stuffed in a drawers with some holes drilled in the back. Haven't complained about suffocation yet! I bought some Bee-Link mini PCs with pretty impressive specs. No idea if I am now being spied on by China.

CharlesW 3y ago

> …I've been waiting for a small form factor with an integrated power supply and a bunch of NVMe slots. Does that exist yet? Have you considered using a NAS as your homelab? I run a few containers (no VMs yet, although I can) and just do that on my QNAP. The TBS-h574TX (https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/tbs-h574tx https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/tbs-h574tx) has five E1.S/M.2 slots. The HS-453DX-8G has two SATA 3.5-inch drive bays and two M.2 2280 SATA SSD slots (https://www.qnap.com/en/product/hs-453dx https://www.qnap.com/en/product/hs-453dx), and the TBS-h574TX. Or you can just throw SATA SSDs into any NAS.

buybackoff 3y ago
It's easier to turn an OptiPlex into NAS. Actually you could pass-through entire SATA stack as a PCI device into TruNAS running in Proxmox VM so it sees SATA ports natively, with all goodies such as SMART.
- znpy 3y ago
  If you just need to run a few containers, you might want to take a look at TrueNas (Scale) rather than Proxmox.
  - belthesar 3y ago
    Depending on the use case, this is definitely an option. I personally prefer using Proxmox under my Container Orchestration hardware because, as it seems to always eventually do, my home lab has become production, and being able to do software patches of the underlying system without service outages is really desirable. I've been agonizing and going back and forth between various potential solutions for this for a couple months now, with the most recent attempt being "Deploy k3s, with a fully separate control plane from the worker nodes, and run all of those atop a Proxmox cluster because being able to migrate VMs across nodes and also stand up isolated workloads to test out other solutions makes changing things in the future far less risky". That said, I was running the Homelab on effectively a single Unraid hyperconverged NAS/compute layer before then, and that worked wonders for quite a long time. I wouldn't consider Unraid my first choice now, given the advancements in TrueNAS SCALE in the time since I chose it as the solution, but the concept of NAS + Container Orchestrator as hyperconverged homelab today is quite attractive.
    - justinclift 3y ago
      > ... being able to do software patches of the underlying system without service outages is really desirable. Yeah, that's what I was looking at Proxmox (8.x) for recently as well, but it never made it through basic qualification testing. VM migration's would randomly hang forever about 25% of the time. Definitely not a case of bad network interconnect either. :( I'm using Ryzen 5000 series cpus on all the test gear though, and recently saw a mention that it may have been a known problem that's fixed. But not super keen on wasting more time. What sort of cpus are your hosts using, and are you using your VMs with Ceph as their storage? :)

natebc 3y ago

Maybe give this thing a look? it's newish and a little expensive but pretty dang well equipped. (not internally powered though) https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-ms-01 https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-ms-01

jay-saint 3y ago
After massively overthinking things for my homelab / firewall, I am ordering one this weekend, just deciding which cpu.
buybackoff 3y ago
It's a mobile CPU (with H). Unless it's fanless it will sound like a rocket lunch. Or it will be thermal-throttled with any sustained load. And it looks too expensive.

unregistereddev 3y ago

There are SFF PC's with integrated power supplies that have a few PCIe slots. PCIe -> NVME adapters are readily available (not my website or article, but posting a link to a review site seemed more genuine than posting Newegg or Amazon links to specific products): https://thunderboltlaptop.com/best-nvme-pcie-adapters/ https://thunderboltlaptop.com/best-nvme-pcie-adapters/

buybackoff 3y ago
The cheapest from Amazon works well. Just make sure it matches PCI Gen and slot overall for throughput, e.g. PCI 3.0 x4 are fine for NVMe 3.0, but for NVMe 4.0 more is needed.

justinclift 3y ago

For the "bunch of NVMe slots", the OWC PCIe NVMe adapters look interesting: * https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-4m2 https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-4m2 (4x NVMe drives) * https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-8m2 https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-8m2 (8x NVMe drives) I'd personally get them without drives included, as the OWC drives seem pretty expensive.