I'm planning to buy a mini pc, will be using it for general purpose and some virtual lab setup, say a couple of vm's running for a lab. Will this be able to handle it? Looking for thoughts from someone who has been using these mini pc's as I have never used one.
https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/B0CP616N6S/ref=ox_sc_ac…
I know :D, looking for thoughts on performance
Looks decent, but if running VMs get an extra 32GB of RAM (it says it's expandable). Maybe also a dedicated 4TB SSD to house the VMs.
I'm keeping this option open.
Have a look on minisforum. Probably need to look up hardware specs on the software you want to use with it to make sure it is compatable.
Thanks, will do.
That's a beast of a machine..
Depends what you want to do with your Mini-lab I guess, but for most that's massive overkill!
Most would look at a Used micro with a 7th gen or older Core i5 or i3.
What are your plans?
Plan: Buy one, as I don't yet have laptop or desktop (I have been using company provided laptop for last few years). I'll be using it for general day to day stuff, browsing, shopping, streaming, etc. and use some software like Vmware, virtual box, and other tech related software to learn stuff. Eg. setting up a server, windows vm, linux vm, and use wireshark to capture the traffic.
So for all of that you could get away with a far lower end box at a far lower end price
ie
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/826270
to run as a dedicated server
leaving heaps of budget to grab a cheapo laptop to do your day to day stuff.
as someone who runs lots of VMs for work and as a hobby no. You'd want atleast 32GB of ram and the 4 cores on the 6500 while fast enough simply aren't enough. I'd say an 8th gen micro with 32GB of ram could work, but then you'd be hitting $500 or so and paying the extra to get this machine which can do 64GB of ram and has a faster CPU is worth it. @Spiderweb i'd advise getting this machine then maybe upgrading to 64GB of ram in the short term as vms can absolutely chew through RAM, especially if you're still running things on your host OS.
@vaporwave: Agreed, except this guy appears to be doing it to learn, not for anything serious. Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like if you're doing higher end stuff you're not going to need to ask this sort of question.
For someone learning, having a machine that you can afford to be down for a few days while you work out what you did wrong is important. (I'd still add RAM especially if running Windows). Ideally you put a Linux Server OS on it and run from there.
If its your only machine then it really sucks!
@ESEMCE: Agreed.
I've got a HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Micro, with an i5 6500T, 1x16GB RAM and 1x256GB SATA SSD. I'm running Proxmox VE and have 8 containers and 1 VM and it's using just over half of the 16GB RAM. If you are wanting to run more than half a dozen VMs, then yeah i think you'll have issues with the old refurbs; so it does depend on your use case.
If you're looking at running some services at home (Pihole, etc) then containers will usually suffice and are generally less resource intensive than full VMs. My sole VM is Home Assistant, and it's a VM because I'm running it via the full Home Assistant OS image. I've got headroom to run a couple more VMs to play with if/when I want. I'm also not smashing my server constantly - it's background services I don't utilise a lot at present (Pihole, UniFi controller, etc) - the HA VM probably sees the most action, and even then it's not a huge load.
If you're solely looking at running VMs, and/or planning on smashing them hard, then I don't think a refurb will do you - perhaps a more recent, larger refurb like an SFF (potential to add a GPU there also), but then as vaporwave says price wise you may be better off just looking at a brand new machine - whether it's of these minis or something similar.
@Chandler: That's pretty much my scenario too, except I'm running on an Orange Pi 5 8Gb with a 1Tb SSD running Ubuntu Server.
I have my Solar Monitoring over SBFSpot running directly on Ubuntu as I couldn't get it to run properly in a container, as well as the following in Docker Containers;
Home Assistant - (operational but not yet really utilised - I have a Zigbee dongle coming soon)
PiHole - fully operational
Unifi Controller - fully operational
I think there's going to be just enough RAM headroom to add a Nextcloud Container as well.
I can't imagine needing anything else. It sips power and runs cool with just heatsinks and passive cooling. I have a future project to add active cooling should it ever need it.
@ESEMCE: Haha - are you me?
VMs
Containers (LXC managed by Proxmox)
Not really utilising the last four yet, mainly got them setup and running and have started dabbling with them. Have got my phone connected to Nextcloud syncing my contacts etc via DavX5, although not sure if it's working (not sure how to find the data on the Nextcloud side…)
I've still got a lot to learn!
@vaporwave: for a server with plenty of vms you really to spring for the 6 cores imho
the 8400, 8500, 9400, 9500 are very good processors for this kind of setup, definitely worth the extra coin over the 4 cores
good news is they unofficially support 64gb too which I definitely needed on my 9500T server
https://www.amazon.com.au/MINISFORUM-UM690S-6900HX-Radeon-Bl… I would go this option myself. Its got more ram, and has 8 full performance cores as opposed to intel's weird hybrid core architecture. Also features a better DGPU in case you do ever get into light gaming or machine learning for example.
wouldn't a ryzen platform make more sense
the power consumption / heat? is ridiculous on this mini pc
not to mention the graphics performance
it's not even cheaper
my home lab desktop is an AMD 3700X - 8 cpus/16 threads, 32GB DDR4 RAM and have used it running a 4 CPU MS SQL VM, 2 CPU web server VM for app dev and 1 CPU VM for simulated client access - did not encounter performance slowdowns etc. but really wouldn't want to run proper vmware devices on anything much slower imo.
They are really small.