I took 5 nucs from work that were decommisioned. from 2017, upgraded the ram and threw in a 1TB nvme ssd m.2 disk in all of them, has been running in a Proxmox cluster happily ever after :).
Yup! I've done that with a bunch of decommission dells that were going to go in the trash. I said: "you're going to do what??". They had i3s in them. Yeah they weren't great, but they weren't even going to strip them down. 🤯
If you want to shave even more watts of those 24 watts you can do some tweaks in your nuc's bios - disable wifi if you do not use it - disable bluetooth if you do not use it - disable the sd card controller - disable front panel audio - disable front (yellow) usb always provide power this shaves off 3-4 watt now to make a real difference change the following settings in the bios: - set the power setting to balanced - disable turbo boost this shaves off another 5-7 watts my nucs run ~14-16 watt here. imho disabling wifi/bluetooth etc makes a lot of sense because those chips use power and you wont ever use this for your lab (unless its connected to wifi) Disabling turbo boost has no noticeable impact on performance, and i tested this both with proxmox and esxi. Even with 35 linux servers running on one nuc it just happily chugs along. Disabling turbo boost makes sure that your nuc remains cooler, and quieter. It also prevents the nuc spiking to 40 watt when fully boosting.
Interesting video, but it'd be nice to include more info relating to cost and comparing power consumption to other systems. If, for example, it uses 1/3rd of the power of an R720 but cost so much that it would take 10+ years to recoup the investment then that should be taken into consideration. Obviously there are other differences (e.g. form factor, noise), but it would be nice to put some more info in for comparison.
I love low power servers! My primary home server is actually running on a Pentium J5040 (which for anyone reading this, actually supports up to 32gb of RAM, not the 8gb Intel says!) and it runs great and even has integrated graphics for HWA Plex transcoding. Plus at idle it pulls less than 10w! I'd love to see more low power server videos!
I had mine move in with me...makes it super easy. She was on Linux 20yrs ago and liked it, cuz it just worked. She had Lindows. Only started back on windows after Dad died and she went to a "friend" for a laptop. In fact I still have both of their mini towers in my collection. My Dad would have a permanent grin on his face now hearing WIN can Linux inside it haha
My mum has been using Linux for maybe 5 years +, the most she does is online browsing, spread sheets, etc... Haven't had a single support call from her in those 5 years.
Running Proxmox on a Nuc i5 paired with 32gb and it's super stable! I love my own little low consumption box. I've watched a lot of your videos and those inspired me to set up my own small server and i absolutely love it. Its running ubuntu/docker, home assistant and truenas. Cloudflare DNS proxy to acces my services, using nginx. All of this because of your videos. Thank you so much for teaching these vuluable skills!
Question: NUC has M.2 and SSD capability. How would you segment the data of the different applications? e.g. What raid you pick for TrueNas, on which platform you install ubuntu etc.. I am on the fence to get either a NUC or a Proliant DL360 Gen9 (being the last option my divorce sentence). Thanks!
That's one nice little mini beast Tim! The NUCs can get pricey, but the used pc/server market is still a bit nuts. I just put my home lab back into commission, my Netgear router wasn't cutting it. So for now I'm running Proxmox with pfsense, pi-hole, and TrueNAS Core (Storage & Plex) VMs, all in a Meshify S2 case with a 3700x, 90GB RAM,.
Low power and efficient builds are definitely a sight for sore eyes. Most reviewers only focus on what kind of performance you can get from the biggest and hottest (literally) chips out there. But as manufacturing nodes continue to get ever smaller, it's amazing what kind of services and things you can run on these tiny machines (same goes for Raspberry Pi's, etc.). Love the content Tim, keep it up!
Cool tiny server! I'm also really proud of the low power consumption of my Server. I have a Desktop HP with an i7-6700, 1 x NVMe, 1 x 2,5" SSD, 1 x 2,5" HDD, 1 x 3,5" HDD. It's running 2 VMs and at least 15 Containers 24/7 and using only 25W in idle. That's really incredible.
Great Vid Tim, I also run a ProXMoX server on a low power platform. I’ve setup my server on an old used Dell 7040m, 1TB m.2 for V-storage and a 2.5” SSD for the OS. It’s only a 35W CPU i7-6700T. It’s fantastic for home use. The small form factor is quite deceiving as it can sit on a shelf like a book.
Thank you so much! I don’t have much time to figure these things out and I always wanted to wait until I buy a house to get some home stuff going, but I didn’t know such good tiny computers exists. Really appreciate your list and video. Brought me joy to know that I don’t need to wait much.
Currently running 5x Dell Optiplex 7060 USFF's as my Proxmox dev proxmox cluster at home. Each has a 1 TB NVME for bulk storage, 32g of ram, and 2x usb 3.x nics for secondary. 1 of them is setup for glusterFS replication of volumes, but the other two are in a LACP bond for vm data. Been solid. Prior to these, at an old job, I ran production Proxmox clusters for all vms, around 120 in total. This was hooked back to a pair of FreeNas boxes via 10g, that were doing a zfs send/recieve for hot/cold setup. This was prior to docker really taking off, around the proxmox 1.6 days. Miss that environment since moving on to new stuff.
I'm using small form factor PC as a server. Specifically, HP ProDesk 400 G4 Mini. Recently upgraded it from 8 GBs of RAM to 32 for exactly this purpose. I'm also going to attach PCIe riser/converter from M2 slot to normal PCIe. On there, i'll attach SATA controller for NAS capabilities. And yes, it will run TrueNAS VM inside it. For geeks, i prepared 2x 8TB IronWolf Pro, 2x 500 GB HDDs and 1x 250 GB SATA SSD for those VMs and also for cache.
Hi @@rullywow3834. Could you elaborate on the possibilities of expanded store for NUCs? I was thinking of having one of the VMs to be the actual NAS. Thanks.
now that I'm thinking about LXC.... I might need a Proxmox host... I ditched my Dell servers for some more efficient AMD Ryzen boxes a few years ago and I'm super happy with it.
In Germany, by many users a low power home server starts by 1.5W and ends by a maximum of 10W :D ...in Idle of corse. You had performe the measurement by booting up. I hope my Intel Nuc will be lower than 5W (N5105, 16 GB RAM, 0,5 - 1 TB SSD). But really nice video. I enjoyed it a lot.
Personally I prefer the J4125. It is 4 cores and only 10 watts TDP. It won't run a super center, but for most people's needs, it is plenty of overhead for a handful of virtual servers and only 1/4 the electric bill at full load compared to this NUC. You are sacrificing a lot of power in comparison, but will save loads of money on both MSRP and electricity.
minor side note, in situations like a nuc in theory it is possible to get a msata to sata adapter as they are essentially sata + power in a mini pci-e form factor... not so much a solution for laptops/netbooks but maybe usable on larger machines
Excellent video! I've been running Ubuntu server on a NUC for a couple years now and just recently switched to Proxmox 7. I love Proxmox for it's ease of use and ability to manage VMs and containers. One issue though is that I've run into an issue with being able to pass a USB device through to a LXC container. I'd love it if you could do a video on this. Of course if it falls in line with the content your trying to put out. Thanks for all of your videos, I'm alway excited for the next release.
I dont know if this may help you, but USB 3.0 is by default a storage device while USB 1.1/2.0 can be HID or other device. USB can be confusing as it is shared data and power.
I love this video. I have been running proxmox on a fanless i7 mini pc for a year now. Love what it lets me do and how cheap it is to run. Also, no noise is a major plus.
I love this kind of mini PCs...I´m running my Proxmox on HP Elitedesk 805 DM with Ryzen 3 Pro 4350GE, 32GB RAM, 1TB NVME 970 Evo and a couple of random 1TB and 500GB SSDs hooked up via USB...It's amazing how dense it is...it's like solid brick of pure and efficient performance. :D
That’s exactly what I did. Those Intel NUCs make outstanding Proxmox nodes! Two of them don’t even take up 1/4 of the space of my old Dell tower, and they are silent, and they barely draw on my UPS when I have a power hit, and I can throw one or two of them in my laptop case taking my entire development network with me when I go remote remote for extended periods of time. I reimagined my entire lab setup based on these little gems.
I'm running R240 with 14k PassMark CPU, 64GB of RAM, 4 SSD's by 2TB each and my power consumption is 40-60W with load... Not sure about price in comparison, but hardware is really power efficient these days :)
Just a shout out to say thanks for all you do. You have a unique gift explaining technology and appreciate your videos and documentation. I hope the links you provided I used to purchase my own nuc kit helps your channel.
Great video Tim! Had a NUC7i7BNH doing this same Proxmox thing for a while but ran into trouble with the onboard NIC locking up/crashing after a while. Ended up using an external usb-c to Ethernet. Since have moved to a x470d4u with 3700x.
Great video! I just bought a Lenovo ThinkCenter M90q with an i5 10500T (6 cores 12 threads) for real cheap (380 €). Those supposedly idle at 12W. I already installed Proxmox VE on it with a Debian container running Docker and Portainer, and more containers and virtual machines will follow. I own a dual Xeon server, but it's power usage is just too high, even at idle, so the little machine is ideal for 14/7 operation. Loved the video. Keep them coming! Cheers! Update: By the way, mine has an auto-on after power loss feature in the BIOS, which is great for a server.
Great video. I was really happy with my NUC i5 8th gen running proxmox until I maxed out CPU load on a VM to see what happens. The NUC did a thermal shutdown. Not a clean one - just powered off ! Obviously the cooling solution wasn't designed for such use...
I/O delay is a new knowledge that I gain from your video just now. Thanks for the mentioning things that we (especially me, from network engineer background) never pay attention to.
I also have an older nuc that I plan on installing KVM on. However, for me to get really serious about these I need dual 2.5 gig nics. For normal use one nic is fine by simply trunking it to a switch but for firewall configurations I need two nics.
really good stuff. Personally had a lot of NUCs go bad, suffer BIOS failures or no boot/post issues, and similar. Thats my only concern in this area. Outside of that, this is great, and takes up minimal room.
I have a few older Skylake NUCs and they can be neurotic or spasticated at times. I attribute this to the difficulties of concentrating compute resources in such a small package. I had issues with UEFI boot and kernel panics with Linux. Forgot that it is a hybrid architecture that is not AMD64.
I also thought to use a NUC11 for a compact and energy efficient Proxmox server. The problems with Intel nuc are availability and price, as they are difficult to find (at least in Europe) and prices often are outrageous.
When i was looking to build my first server like 3 months ago i didnt like the price of the NUC either. Went with a Asrock deskmini X300 and 5700G from AMD, 2NVMe slots and 2 sata ports on it. Quite efficient and major overkill for what i actually do with it. Total costs was like 700 euro, have 16gb ram and a 1tb and 512gb nvme disk in it. Its cruising along and bearly brakes a sweat, running pihole/unbound, VPN gateway, PMS and some other low resource utilitys. If i could go back i would go for the deskmini h470 with intel for PMS but mayne thats a option besides a NUC.
I'm running an Intel nuc11 i5 with 64GB RAM and a Samsung 980 Pro NVME with Proxmox, 4 VMs and 5 LXCs for about half a year now. It's just great! I'm super happy with it.
Hey Tim. Thanks for the vid. Would love a series on what you're doing with this. I also dream of setting my parents up with something like this that gives them local services and potentially ties back to my network for distributed and backup services.
So how's your mom doing with the old proxmox server? Can you fellow up with what you hooker her up with, how you remotely manage it, if your doing any site to site networking and how she is taking to the experience and use cases you setup? Also, maybe one of your one hundred days of homelab could be for your moms house - would be interesting to see what you change/add 6 months later
Love the new homelab server! I just got 2 11th Gen NUCs to replace my old, power-hungry lab as well, love them! Does your Intel NUC offer a tdp-down mode? I got some custom NUCs from the guys at SimplyNUC and they have options for 15w, 25w and 40w in the BIOS. The 40w only got me about 15% better performance at the cost of a lot more fan noise, so I ended up sticking with 25... but I'm curious if the Intel branded one offers this and if they do a better job with cooling/noise at 40w?
Well, i am in love with my NUC, got an i3 7100u NUC with 16gb of ram and a 2tb hdd, and conected with USB 2 more docking stations with 4 hdds in them of 2tb each, got a nextcloud server running on ZORIN OS in raidz2 (5x2tb hdds). My max power draw on ALL the equipment is around 30W, i could not believe that.
Right on time video Tim. Was looking for a replacement for my noisy and power hungry HPE ML350 Gen9. Been watching some videos on SFF/1L desktop systems as an alternative. This solution looks amazingly good. Thanks for sharing. Cheers!
I bought a Mini-PC with the same CPU as in the i5 version of the Intel NUC (including some cheap 8G RAM + 128G SSD) for under 400€. It arrived friday and I will put it to the test this week.
NUC's make for excellent small servers. I upgraded my server(s) a few weeks ago, went from an old Xeon 1230v3 with 32GB RAM and a Microserver Gen8 with 16GB RAM and 4x8TB HDD's to a new 10400F with 64GB RAM, 4x8TB drives + 2x16TB drives (for now) running Proxmox of an Kingston NV1 500GB NVME with TrueNAS Core as a VM and passing trough an LSI card for the drives and a LEMP server. More VM's will be added in time though.
I bought a refurbished Lenovo Tiny M93P from eBay. With just 8GB (up to 16G) of Ram is running just fine. I have both the OS and the VMs on a single 512GB SSD and I’m planning to add another 256GB SSD.
@Jyv Ben unfortunately there isn't such a feature :( i also need it to be an exact clone of the original. Edit: you can backup VM's and the file system.
"It all started with a NUC" that's what I always say. Used to run everything on a single NUC6i5SYH. Then my homelab and selfhosting grew thanks to these channels, now I have a cabinet full of those 2nd hand Lenovo/Dell Tiny/Micro thinclients. Nice way to have resources to play around for those keeping watch on the electricity bill.
I started last year with one of the Dells and I have grown it up so much in the time since I started tinkering with it and proxmox. I love how power efficient it is combined with how well it can perform under load for the price. For my purposes it's perfect for what I needed. 😁
Actually most mini pc do a great job as a low power home server, they only lack storage space to be used as a NAS. It's better to go for a reputable brand (ex. Minisforum) as bios and hardware optimization are crucial for energy efficiency and we're not talking performance per watt that's easy to achieve but idle power.
Funny enough I just installed Proxmox 8 on the NUC you decommissioned, 12gb RAM, same model with an H at the end, I think it is because it's a bigger case that can hold a SSD. Using a tiny 128gb now but I might add a bigger one for more fun!
Great video again, Tim. I enjoyed the power measurements, as that's what most would want to see from a micro-server. However, one "point of order:" saying those msata are too expensive, and then spending $1,300USD on a new server, one of the most expensive (Intel) of that form-factor, is, uhmmm....yeah. You could have just said, "I wanted something newer than Gen4, so I bought this." :) It's a cool new toy for sure.
I just didn’t want to sink money into antiquated hardware. You should have seen the sodimm prices for ddr-3. Would have been a money pit in a 8 year old system
@@TechnoTim Tim 100% agree on that. I'm there with you: I'm having to reevaluate my mental deficiency with keeping old Dell 1650 and 1750 systems thinking somehow they are useful to put in work in my lab. I don't know what I was thinking keeping them around. A lot of old Xeon E5-5xxx systems, too. Power hungry for sure. I'm stripping parts (DDR2 LOL) and trashing them to the ewaste people. :)
Such a brilliant video thank you! I have just done pretty much the same setup, what do you do with your M.2 ssd? Did you set it up as a zsf? What did you do in order to use it?
NUCs are cool but I think TinyMiniMicro machines (ServeThrHome's moniker for Thinkpad, HP and Dell's 1L machines) still present a better package. Basically the same size, but with as efficient, yet more kick-if-you-need upgradeable CPUs (which may even go for 2 generations depending on chipset support by Intel), a pushier thermal envelope, upgradeable Wifi, and in the case of the Thinkpads you even get multiple NVMe slots. Some models even allow for either a Quadro or low form factor ADM GPU, or even Thunderbolt (albeit these two are rare and expensive). You can get them up to 10 cores on 10th gen, and now they also come with Ryzen options apparently. I'm really hoping for a great 12th gen Tiny to splurge myself.
Personally, I’m moving my homelab from a rackmounted gear, like my dual Xeon server, running Proxmox, TrueNAS, a bunch of VMs, etc, to a Synology for storage and will be adding NUCs and NUC-like machines… Ideally, 3 NUCs in a cluster + a low power PC router (one of those AliExpress miniPCs with 6x 2.5Gbps ports). :)
I love the idea using a nuc for power consumption and plenty of power, but only a couple things i'm not sure about, but heard you mention pcie connections... i do like gpu passthrough, and ecc ram. Look forward to more videos with this NUC :)
Nice video, Tim, thank you. I am using NUC Hades Canyon for one of the nodes for my proxmox home lab for several years already. I will consider your choice as my second node there. Best
Cool. What are options for more NIC's? I'm currently running full server hardware and virtual firewalls. Dedicated NIC's would be preferred for WAN connections.
Hi Tim, thank you for sharing this. We used 6 NUCs as test boxes in my company (to test other devices) with an Ubuntu server on them. They were ON for almost 2 years after that they suddenly started dying one after the other. The mother board refused to turn ON. So I’m not sure about using any NUC as a server. Thanks a lot for the high quality content.
Thanks for this video. Your timing is great. I’m getting ready to start a power efficient SFF home lab using an i5-12400, 32GB RAM (eventually 64GB), a SATA boot drive, 1TB NVMe for VMs and a 10TB HDD for storing large files. It would be very helpful if you could provide a guide on how to set up the boot drive for Proxmox.
@@gordonfortune3859 I’m going with a Gigabyte AORUS Pro B660M motherboard. I’m still about a month away from doing a build. I’ll put together a video of the build and the thinking around it. I don’t have a big TH-cam channel. But, if you subscribe, I’ll be sure to do the video. Thanks!
I have a handful of Dell Wyse thin clients with Proxmox installed. They're great for running various lightweight (or not) VMs that you want to be able to turn on/off independently
I love low power draw home server, that why I started on a Raspberry pi, I need a bit cpu power for media streaming so running my home server now on a decommissioned thinkpad. I might go this route in the future.
Hi Tim. I am tempting to go Proxmox-NUC too. Can you please point me to your update video about this or can you tell me at this stage, how many VMs you running and what average W usaged per 24hours ? Thank you !
I am at this very moment re-purposing an older "low power" i5-4590S as a third node to my Proxmox cluster to run my low power but critical services like OpnSense, Pi-hole, etc. This allows me to shut off the Dell R710 and 720 when we have bad weather coming through but retain internet. I wish I could use a Nuc but I need the extra Ethernet ports.
After watching a lot of what Tim has done, I moved my "huge" Dell servers to secondary (like you) and put smaller, power-efficient (on a UPS!!!) boxes as primary. For all critical "production" services at home. Really makes a difference. An Ansible "shutdown the hogs" script takes care of fast shutdowns of all of the power-hungry when storms, tornadoes, vacations, etc., happen.
I was going to get 3x of these to explore/learn High Availability Proxmox clustering on top of Ceph for use in my home using thin client access to the VMs. Any changes you might make to the HW you’re using in this vid? I know it’s not ideal but it will be fun to learn on.
Hi Tim..great video. I was looking to replace an older Zotac SBC setup and purchased a NUC after watching your vid. One comment..when installing Proxmox, I had to disable secure boot in the BIOS in order to get it to boot up.
I'm running Proxmox on a 2nd gen i7 laptop with only 16gb ram in it, lol. I'm in need of an upgrade fairly badly. But the laptop was free from work. My biggest limitation is ram. That NUC sure is cool. I was thinking about putting my own Ryzen based system together in a mITX form factor. Honestly the NUC is fairly reasonably priced by comparison.
It's good if you dont need storage for NAS, I have 2x8 TB + 2x 3TB WD red, they ain't gonna fit XD but it's very interesting to see how efficient things are now
Hi Tim ! Many thanks for your great videos ! Just a little question what file system are you using on the single 1TB SSD drive ? ZFS ? Many thanks for answer :) Best regards from France ;)
Really great to see what intel nuc can achive. I wounder how effecient it could be with a p31 gold and some low power ram? Im planing to do a build my self i wanna see if using an unlocked cpu and a motherboard with great voltage control, if its possible to tweak things so you get below 10 watts idle and then having headrooom if or when you need the extra speed. But my use case is off grid solar so even 24 watts idle is a lot likley some linux optimastion and cron jobs to power cycle it can help but everything has its cons and pros :p
I took a Dell 3070MFF with 32GB RAM for my Proxmox-Server. There ist a Intel Core i5-9500T inside with the 256GB-NVme-SystemDrive and a 1TB SSD from Crucial (MX500) for my VMs. It´s ok for me. A Lenovo m83 is my second Proxmox-Server for Testing and a old Fujitsu P420 is my Proxmox-Backupserver. Good Videos!!! Greetings from Germany!
I did the same, mainserver is a ryzen 5800x with 128g ecc ram and ssd/hdd/nvme zfs pools with a lot of storage, and as backup a nuc11 i3 with 16g ram and nvme... The only real things you need is high availability pihole+opnsense, to not loose the internet connection if you upgrade/work on the mainserver 🙈 Dunno what you are going todo with 64g ram, and an i7 for a failiver machine 😂 Maybe you can slowly replace your behemoth rack with sth small and more efficient 😂
WAIT! 25 W isn't bad, but my ATX-based server has a 12600K, Z690, 2 x 16 GB RAM, 2 x WD SN770 1TB, 2 x Samsung PM1735 3.2 TB. That thing just consumes 70 W while running a Home Assistant instance and my development Ubuntu Server 24.04. Maybe I expected a way lower power usage for the mini PC, but I'm a bit disappointed that it's not sitting around 10-15 W as a mac mini would do.
Nice video, your script seemed well thought out. Would like to see if you can get 10gbit working with that over a USB/Thunderbolt adapter, and if so, can it actually fully utilize all 10gbit. Would be a great way to show off iperf3 and how to speed test locally.
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I took 5 nucs from work that were decommisioned. from 2017, upgraded the ram and threw in a 1TB nvme ssd m.2 disk in all of them, has been running in a Proxmox cluster happily ever after :).
Happy little nodes!
Yup! I've done that with a bunch of decommission dells that were going to go in the trash. I said: "you're going to do what??". They had i3s in them. Yeah they weren't great, but they weren't even going to strip them down. 🤯
5? Isn't that to much?
@@marine1718 One can never have too many.
@@jaygreentree4394 if u pay for energy it is
If you want to shave even more watts of those 24 watts you can do some tweaks in your nuc's bios
- disable wifi if you do not use it
- disable bluetooth if you do not use it
- disable the sd card controller
- disable front panel audio
- disable front (yellow) usb always provide power
this shaves off 3-4 watt
now to make a real difference change the following settings in the bios:
- set the power setting to balanced
- disable turbo boost
this shaves off another 5-7 watts
my nucs run ~14-16 watt here. imho disabling wifi/bluetooth etc makes a lot of sense because those chips use power and you wont ever use this for your lab (unless its connected to wifi)
Disabling turbo boost has no noticeable impact on performance, and i tested this both with proxmox and esxi. Even with 35 linux servers running on one nuc it just happily chugs along. Disabling turbo boost makes sure that your nuc remains cooler, and quieter. It also prevents the nuc spiking to 40 watt when fully boosting.
hi, great, thx
Interesting video, but it'd be nice to include more info relating to cost and comparing power consumption to other systems. If, for example, it uses 1/3rd of the power of an R720 but cost so much that it would take 10+ years to recoup the investment then that should be taken into consideration. Obviously there are other differences (e.g. form factor, noise), but it would be nice to put some more info in for comparison.
@@jondoough but most of us don't get hardware for free
@@jondoough let me know how you get hardware for free!
I love low power servers! My primary home server is actually running on a Pentium J5040 (which for anyone reading this, actually supports up to 32gb of RAM, not the 8gb Intel says!) and it runs great and even has integrated graphics for HWA Plex transcoding. Plus at idle it pulls less than 10w! I'd love to see more low power server videos!
Needs more exclamation points.
how?in my j5040,not work 16 gb of RAM
Yeah, how? plug n play, bios setting...YT home server build video ?
It takes a truely brave man to put his mom on Linux
Better setup vnc. Admit it, you just miss your mom and you want her to call you more often
This will be one giant experiment but her Windows machine stops working at least once a year.
I had mine move in with me...makes it super easy. She was on Linux 20yrs ago and liked it, cuz it just worked. She had Lindows. Only started back on windows after Dad died and she went to a "friend" for a laptop. In fact I still have both of their mini towers in my collection. My Dad would have a permanent grin on his face now hearing WIN can Linux inside it haha
My mum has been using Linux for maybe 5 years +, the most she does is online browsing, spread sheets, etc... Haven't had a single support call from her in those 5 years.
My old cat was named Linux 😢
Running Proxmox on a Nuc i5 paired with 32gb and it's super stable! I love my own little low consumption box. I've watched a lot of your videos and those inspired me to set up my own small server and i absolutely love it. Its running ubuntu/docker, home assistant and truenas. Cloudflare DNS proxy to acces my services, using nginx. All of this because of your videos. Thank you so much for teaching these vuluable skills!
Awesome!
Question: NUC has M.2 and SSD capability. How would you segment the data of the different applications? e.g. What raid you pick for TrueNas, on which platform you install ubuntu etc.. I am on the fence to get either a NUC or a Proliant DL360 Gen9 (being the last option my divorce sentence). Thanks!
That's one nice little mini beast Tim! The NUCs can get pricey, but the used pc/server market is still a bit nuts. I just put my home lab back into commission, my Netgear router wasn't cutting it. So for now I'm running Proxmox with pfsense, pi-hole, and TrueNAS Core (Storage & Plex) VMs, all in a Meshify S2 case with a 3700x, 90GB RAM,.
Low power and efficient builds are definitely a sight for sore eyes. Most reviewers only focus on what kind of performance you can get from the biggest and hottest (literally) chips out there. But as manufacturing nodes continue to get ever smaller, it's amazing what kind of services and things you can run on these tiny machines (same goes for Raspberry Pi's, etc.). Love the content Tim, keep it up!
Agreed! Thank you so much!
Cool tiny server! I'm also really proud of the low power consumption of my Server. I have a Desktop HP with an i7-6700, 1 x NVMe, 1 x 2,5" SSD, 1 x 2,5" HDD, 1 x 3,5" HDD. It's running 2 VMs and at least 15 Containers 24/7 and using only 25W in idle. That's really incredible.
Great Vid Tim, I also run a ProXMoX server on a low power platform. I’ve setup my server on an old used Dell 7040m, 1TB m.2 for V-storage and a 2.5” SSD for the OS. It’s only a 35W CPU i7-6700T. It’s fantastic for home use. The small form factor is quite deceiving as it can sit on a shelf like a book.
Thank you so much!
I don’t have much time to figure these things out and I always wanted to wait until I buy a house to get some home stuff going, but I didn’t know such good tiny computers exists.
Really appreciate your list and video. Brought me joy to know that I don’t need to wait much.
Yes! Exactly! Why wait when you can run a NUC today, then repurpose it later!
Currently running 5x Dell Optiplex 7060 USFF's as my Proxmox dev proxmox cluster at home. Each has a 1 TB NVME for bulk storage, 32g of ram, and 2x usb 3.x nics for secondary. 1 of them is setup for glusterFS replication of volumes, but the other two are in a LACP bond for vm data.
Been solid.
Prior to these, at an old job, I ran production Proxmox clusters for all vms, around 120 in total. This was hooked back to a pair of FreeNas boxes via 10g, that were doing a zfs send/recieve for hot/cold setup. This was prior to docker really taking off, around the proxmox 1.6 days. Miss that environment since moving on to new stuff.
I love the "baby Dells" and use them too for small cluster members, OPNsense, pxe servers, etc. Great boxes.
I'm using small form factor PC as a server. Specifically, HP ProDesk 400 G4 Mini. Recently upgraded it from 8 GBs of RAM to 32 for exactly this purpose. I'm also going to attach PCIe riser/converter from M2 slot to normal PCIe. On there, i'll attach SATA controller for NAS capabilities. And yes, it will run TrueNAS VM inside it. For geeks, i prepared 2x 8TB IronWolf Pro, 2x 500 GB HDDs and 1x 250 GB SATA SSD for those VMs and also for cache.
Intel NUCs are just great for home hypervisors. They, of course, lack large storage capacity, but if that's not a concern they're awesome.
Absolutely. Pair it with either external USB storage/iSCSI/NAS shares and it's a great way to start with hypervisors like Proxmox etc.
Hi @@rullywow3834. Could you elaborate on the possibilities of expanded store for NUCs? I was thinking of having one of the VMs to be the actual NAS. Thanks.
now that I'm thinking about LXC.... I might need a Proxmox host... I ditched my Dell servers for some more efficient AMD Ryzen boxes a few years ago and I'm super happy with it.
In Germany, by many users a low power home server starts by 1.5W and ends by a maximum of 10W :D ...in Idle of corse. You had performe the measurement by booting up.
I hope my Intel Nuc will be lower than 5W (N5105, 16 GB RAM, 0,5 - 1 TB SSD).
But really nice video. I enjoyed it a lot.
Personally I prefer the J4125. It is 4 cores and only 10 watts TDP. It won't run a super center, but for most people's needs, it is plenty of overhead for a handful of virtual servers and only 1/4 the electric bill at full load compared to this NUC. You are sacrificing a lot of power in comparison, but will save loads of money on both MSRP and electricity.
minor side note, in situations like a nuc in theory it is possible to get a msata to sata adapter as they are essentially sata + power in a mini pci-e form factor... not so much a solution for laptops/netbooks but maybe usable on larger machines
Excellent video! I've been running Ubuntu server on a NUC for a couple years now and just recently switched to Proxmox 7. I love Proxmox for it's ease of use and ability to manage VMs and containers. One issue though is that I've run into an issue with being able to pass a USB device through to a LXC container. I'd love it if you could do a video on this. Of course if it falls in line with the content your trying to put out.
Thanks for all of your videos, I'm alway excited for the next release.
I dont know if this may help you, but USB 3.0 is by default a storage device while USB 1.1/2.0 can be HID or other device. USB can be confusing as it is shared data and power.
I love this video. I have been running proxmox on a fanless i7 mini pc for a year now. Love what it lets me do and how cheap it is to run. Also, no noise is a major plus.
I love this kind of mini PCs...I´m running my Proxmox on HP Elitedesk 805 DM with Ryzen 3 Pro 4350GE, 32GB RAM, 1TB NVME 970 Evo and a couple of random 1TB and 500GB SSDs hooked up via USB...It's amazing how dense it is...it's like solid brick of pure and efficient performance. :D
That’s exactly what I did. Those Intel NUCs make outstanding Proxmox nodes! Two of them don’t even take up 1/4 of the space of my old Dell tower, and they are silent, and they barely draw on my UPS when I have a power hit, and I can throw one or two of them in my laptop case taking my entire development network with me when I go remote remote for extended periods of time. I reimagined my entire lab setup based on these little gems.
Im running Proxmox on a "HP ProDesk 400 G4 Mini" with 16GB Ram, 2TB storage, i5 7500T. I bought for 150 bucks. The best server I ever had
I'm running R240 with 14k PassMark CPU, 64GB of RAM, 4 SSD's by 2TB each and my power consumption is 40-60W with load... Not sure about price in comparison, but hardware is really power efficient these days :)
Just a shout out to say thanks for all you do. You have a unique gift explaining technology and appreciate your videos and documentation. I hope the links you provided I used to purchase my own nuc kit helps your channel.
Thank you so much and yes, using the links does help me continue to do this!
Great video Tim! Had a NUC7i7BNH doing this same Proxmox thing for a while but ran into trouble with the onboard NIC locking up/crashing after a while. Ended up using an external usb-c to Ethernet. Since have moved to a x470d4u with 3700x.
have you notes any issues with USB-C Ethernet?
Very cool my dude. Would love to see some ideas for low power budget scalable NASs
Great video! I just bought a Lenovo ThinkCenter M90q with an i5 10500T (6 cores 12 threads) for real cheap (380 €). Those supposedly idle at 12W. I already installed Proxmox VE on it with a Debian container running Docker and Portainer, and more containers and virtual machines will follow. I own a dual Xeon server, but it's power usage is just too high, even at idle, so the little machine is ideal for 14/7 operation. Loved the video. Keep them coming! Cheers!
Update: By the way, mine has an auto-on after power loss feature in the BIOS, which is great for a server.
Great video. I was really happy with my NUC i5 8th gen running proxmox until I maxed out CPU load on a VM to see what happens. The NUC did a thermal shutdown. Not a clean one - just powered off ! Obviously the cooling solution wasn't designed for such use...
I/O delay is a new knowledge that I gain from your video just now.
Thanks for the mentioning things that we (especially me, from network engineer background) never pay attention to.
Thanks! I would have never noticed but etcd and sensitive to disk latency and if it weren't for kubernetes I never would have chased it down!
Love ProxMox and love Microcenter! Thanks for the video
I also have an older nuc that I plan on installing KVM on. However, for me to get really serious about these I need dual 2.5 gig nics. For normal use one nic is fine by simply trunking it to a switch but for firewall configurations I need two nics.
Dual 1Gig would also be fine.
In fact: I turned down a Dell R320 and now my NUC8i3 is my main Proxmox server, it has 6 VM 24/7 (a win10 too!), I can't be happier!
really good stuff. Personally had a lot of NUCs go bad, suffer BIOS failures or no boot/post issues, and similar. Thats my only concern in this area.
Outside of that, this is great, and takes up minimal room.
For me it was the video woes
I have a few older Skylake NUCs and they can be neurotic or spasticated at times. I attribute this to the difficulties of concentrating compute resources in such a small package. I had issues with UEFI boot and kernel panics with Linux. Forgot that it is a hybrid architecture that is not AMD64.
This is exactly what I've been looking for. Subbed and I will work on my intel nuc soon too.
I also thought to use a NUC11 for a compact and energy efficient Proxmox server. The problems with Intel nuc are availability and price, as they are difficult to find (at least in Europe) and prices often are outrageous.
True statements!
Try a used Dell optiplex micro pc on ebay-with i5 or i7. They can be had for cheap.
I've been looking at getting one of those. A little more power hungry but still very affordable and power efficient.
When i was looking to build my first server like 3 months ago i didnt like the price of the NUC either.
Went with a Asrock deskmini X300 and 5700G from AMD, 2NVMe slots and 2 sata ports on it.
Quite efficient and major overkill for what i actually do with it.
Total costs was like 700 euro, have 16gb ram and a 1tb and 512gb nvme disk in it.
Its cruising along and bearly brakes a sweat, running pihole/unbound, VPN gateway, PMS and some other low resource utilitys.
If i could go back i would go for the deskmini h470 with intel for PMS but mayne thats a option besides a NUC.
@@Niet_Belangrijk I also thought the deskmini as a possible option, but I was never sure if it's realtek NIC card would work well with proxmox.
Wow Tim have been subbed since the early days but took a break from YT. It's nice to see you growing. Always good stuff.
I'm running an Intel nuc11 i5 with 64GB RAM and a Samsung 980 Pro NVME with Proxmox, 4 VMs and 5 LXCs for about half a year now. It's just great! I'm super happy with it.
Hey Tim. Thanks for the vid. Would love a series on what you're doing with this. I also dream of setting my parents up with something like this that gives them local services and potentially ties back to my network for distributed and backup services.
So how's your mom doing with the old proxmox server? Can you fellow up with what you hooker her up with, how you remotely manage it, if your doing any site to site networking and how she is taking to the experience and use cases you setup?
Also, maybe one of your one hundred days of homelab could be for your moms house - would be interesting to see what you change/add 6 months later
Love the new homelab server! I just got 2 11th Gen NUCs to replace my old, power-hungry lab as well, love them!
Does your Intel NUC offer a tdp-down mode? I got some custom NUCs from the guys at SimplyNUC and they have options for 15w, 25w and 40w in the BIOS. The 40w only got me about 15% better performance at the cost of a lot more fan noise, so I ended up sticking with 25... but I'm curious if the Intel branded one offers this and if they do a better job with cooling/noise at 40w?
Well, i am in love with my NUC, got an i3 7100u NUC with 16gb of ram and a 2tb hdd, and conected with USB 2 more docking stations with 4 hdds in them of 2tb each, got a nextcloud server running on ZORIN OS in raidz2 (5x2tb hdds). My max power draw on ALL the equipment is around 30W, i could not believe that.
Your videos are full of golden nuggets! Ventoy...this is a game changer for me thank you.
Happy to help! I have a video on that too!
Right on time video Tim. Was looking for a replacement for my noisy and power hungry HPE ML350 Gen9. Been watching some videos on SFF/1L desktop systems as an alternative. This solution looks amazingly good. Thanks for sharing. Cheers!
my whole Homelab is running on 2 Intel Nuc 10th Gen with an i7 and a 7th Gen i5 and it works great. I never thought that a homelab can be that cheap.
I am running a 8th Gen Nuc for years. Only 25 watts peak with an I5 inside. Built in into a fanless case. I love those Nucs..
I love them too!
Low servers is the future.
Nice video!
Needs more dark mode!
Also, "excuse the mess"??? That was the cleanest desk I've ever seen.
Great video!
Thank you! The wide shot showed all my cords and lights but I cut in to it while editing!
I bought a Mini-PC with the same CPU as in the i5 version of the Intel NUC (including some cheap 8G RAM + 128G SSD) for under 400€. It arrived friday and I will put it to the test this week.
NUC's make for excellent small servers.
I upgraded my server(s) a few weeks ago, went from an old Xeon 1230v3 with 32GB RAM and a Microserver Gen8 with 16GB RAM and 4x8TB HDD's to a new 10400F with 64GB RAM, 4x8TB drives + 2x16TB drives (for now) running Proxmox of an Kingston NV1 500GB NVME with TrueNAS Core as a VM and passing trough an LSI card for the drives and a LEMP server.
More VM's will be added in time though.
Do you have a M.2 to PCIE riser cable?
Do I understand your new server is a NUC ? How is all that storage attached to the NUC ?
@@jp_baril No, it's not. I just said that NUC's makes great small servers.
I bought a refurbished Lenovo Tiny M93P from eBay. With just 8GB (up to 16G) of Ram is running just fine.
I have both the OS and the VMs on a single 512GB SSD and I’m planning to add another 256GB SSD.
This is awesome exactly what I'm looking to do. Thanks for sharing
Just about to do exactly the same - thanks for the pointers.
Very nice Tim! Would be great to see a tutorial on migrating a proxmox installation from ssd/hdd - nvme
does proxmox let you do a config backup ?
if yes, just setup a new server, import config (hope it works) and then migrate from old to new.
@Jyv Ben unfortunately there isn't such a feature :( i also need it to be an exact clone of the original.
Edit: you can backup VM's and the file system.
I use ProxMox on a Lenovo SFF i3 8th gen (4c4t), 16GB ddr 2400mhz, 128gb Sara sad, 256GB m.2 etc and it really does a great job for my home lab.
"It all started with a NUC" that's what I always say. Used to run everything on a single NUC6i5SYH. Then my homelab and selfhosting grew thanks to these channels, now I have a cabinet full of those 2nd hand Lenovo/Dell Tiny/Micro thinclients. Nice way to have resources to play around for those keeping watch on the electricity bill.
I started last year with one of the Dells and I have grown it up so much in the time since I started tinkering with it and proxmox. I love how power efficient it is combined with how well it can perform under load for the price. For my purposes it's perfect for what I needed. 😁
Because of your videos i now want to build a mini proxmox server :D
It’s awesome!
@@TechnoTim It surely is
Actually most mini pc do a great job as a low power home server, they only lack storage space to be used as a NAS.
It's better to go for a reputable brand (ex. Minisforum) as bios and hardware optimization are crucial for energy efficiency and we're not talking performance per watt that's easy to achieve but idle power.
Funny enough I just installed Proxmox 8 on the NUC you decommissioned, 12gb RAM, same model with an H at the end, I think it is because it's a bigger case that can hold a SSD. Using a tiny 128gb now but I might add a bigger one for more fun!
Great video again, Tim. I enjoyed the power measurements, as that's what most would want to see from a micro-server. However, one "point of order:" saying those msata are too expensive, and then spending $1,300USD on a new server, one of the most expensive (Intel) of that form-factor, is, uhmmm....yeah. You could have just said, "I wanted something newer than Gen4, so I bought this." :) It's a cool new toy for sure.
I just didn’t want to sink money into antiquated hardware. You should have seen the sodimm prices for ddr-3. Would have been a money pit in a 8 year old system
@@TechnoTim Tim 100% agree on that. I'm there with you: I'm having to reevaluate my mental deficiency with keeping old Dell 1650 and 1750 systems thinking somehow they are useful to put in work in my lab. I don't know what I was thinking keeping them around. A lot of old Xeon E5-5xxx systems, too. Power hungry for sure. I'm stripping parts (DDR2 LOL) and trashing them to the ewaste people. :)
One day I will have a set up like this.
Such a brilliant video thank you!
I have just done pretty much the same setup, what do you do with your M.2 ssd? Did you set it up as a zsf? What did you do in order to use it?
NUCs are cool but I think TinyMiniMicro machines (ServeThrHome's moniker for Thinkpad, HP and Dell's 1L machines) still present a better package. Basically the same size, but with as efficient, yet more kick-if-you-need upgradeable CPUs (which may even go for 2 generations depending on chipset support by Intel), a pushier thermal envelope, upgradeable Wifi, and in the case of the Thinkpads you even get multiple NVMe slots. Some models even allow for either a Quadro or low form factor ADM GPU, or even Thunderbolt (albeit these two are rare and expensive). You can get them up to 10 cores on 10th gen, and now they also come with Ryzen options apparently. I'm really hoping for a great 12th gen Tiny to splurge myself.
Personally, I’m moving my homelab from a rackmounted gear, like my dual Xeon server, running Proxmox, TrueNAS, a bunch of VMs, etc, to a Synology for storage and will be adding NUCs and NUC-like machines…
Ideally, 3 NUCs in a cluster + a low power PC router (one of those AliExpress miniPCs with 6x 2.5Gbps ports). :)
Love it!
Excellent Idea! I have some power hungry (full rack of servers/nas's/etc/) but I also need a remote lab. Levi you're a gentleman and a scholar!....lol
I love the idea using a nuc for power consumption and plenty of power, but only a couple things i'm not sure about, but heard you mention pcie connections... i do like gpu passthrough, and ecc ram. Look forward to more videos with this NUC :)
Are there any BIOS settings you altered? Like turning off HT, I had hoped for some optimization settings for that
You make such good content ! Keep it up Tim !!
I've never heard of Ventoy until today. Glad I did though!
Nice video, Tim, thank you. I am using NUC Hades Canyon for one of the nodes for my proxmox home lab for several years already. I will consider your choice as my second node there. Best
Recently got the i9 11gen version of this. Excited to migrate my bare metal servers to the i9 in proxmox environment. Thanks for the videos
thank you!
Cool. What are options for more NIC's? I'm currently running full server hardware and virtual firewalls. Dedicated NIC's would be preferred for WAN connections.
Hi Tim, thank you for sharing this. We used 6 NUCs as test boxes in my company (to test other devices) with an Ubuntu server on them. They were ON for almost 2 years after that they suddenly started dying one after the other. The mother board refused to turn ON. So I’m not sure about using any NUC as a server. Thanks a lot for the high quality content.
Thanks for this video. Your timing is great. I’m getting ready to start a power efficient SFF home lab using an i5-12400, 32GB RAM (eventually 64GB), a SATA boot drive, 1TB NVMe for VMs and a 10TB HDD for storing large files.
It would be very helpful if you could provide a guide on how to set up the boot drive for Proxmox.
Here's one of my old ones. It's one of my first ever! th-cam.com/video/7OVaWaqO2aU/w-d-xo.html
@@TechnoTim thank you.
What motherboard are you using @Mark, would love to see your build as I’m looking at the same setup.
@@gordonfortune3859 I’m going with a Gigabyte AORUS Pro B660M motherboard. I’m still about a month away from doing a build. I’ll put together a video of the build and the thinking around it. I don’t have a big TH-cam channel. But, if you subscribe, I’ll be sure to do the video.
Thanks!
I have a handful of Dell Wyse thin clients with Proxmox installed. They're great for running various lightweight (or not) VMs that you want to be able to turn on/off independently
Great tip!
I love low power draw home server, that why I started on a Raspberry pi, I need a bit cpu power for media streaming so running my home server now on a decommissioned thinkpad. I might go this route in the future.
Hi Tim.
I am tempting to go Proxmox-NUC too.
Can you please point me to your update video about this or can you tell me at this stage, how many VMs you running and what average W usaged per 24hours ?
Thank you !
Its a great idea and been doing it for a while on pi. great content you are making. thanks for that. cheers.
Great video Techno Tim. Makes me think about upgrading my 3 HP Elitedesk G1's
I am at this very moment re-purposing an older "low power" i5-4590S as a third node to my Proxmox cluster to run my low power but critical services like OpnSense, Pi-hole, etc. This allows me to shut off the Dell R710 and 720 when we have bad weather coming through but retain internet. I wish I could use a Nuc but I need the extra Ethernet ports.
After watching a lot of what Tim has done, I moved my "huge" Dell servers to secondary (like you) and put smaller, power-efficient (on a UPS!!!) boxes as primary. For all critical "production" services at home. Really makes a difference. An Ansible "shutdown the hogs" script takes care of fast shutdowns of all of the power-hungry when storms, tornadoes, vacations, etc., happen.
I was going to get 3x of these to explore/learn High Availability Proxmox clustering on top of Ceph for use in my home using thin client access to the VMs. Any changes you might make to the HW you’re using in this vid? I know it’s not ideal but it will be fun to learn on.
No changes, they are great, still run these same models today! Created a cluster video on them recently!
Great Video Tim! How did you configure the 'fast' storage in proxmox, is it a single disk ZFS?
Thank you! No ZFS on the single disk, just LVM!
@@TechnoTim do you have any guide to doing this? And is it because zfs is too overkill for a single nvme disk
@@KeshavSreekumar @techno tim I’d like to see a guide on this too.
Useful video. I want to get one of this but heard that the NIC on the NUC might not be compatible with the latest released versions of ESXi?
It seems like this is good, except I need more ethernet ports. Do you have a USB to Ethernet adapter that would work well with proxmox?
Hi Tim..great video. I was looking to replace an older Zotac SBC setup and purchased a NUC after watching your vid. One comment..when installing Proxmox, I had to disable secure boot in the BIOS in order to get it to boot up.
Good call!
I'm running Proxmox on a 2nd gen i7 laptop with only 16gb ram in it, lol. I'm in need of an upgrade fairly badly. But the laptop was free from work. My biggest limitation is ram. That NUC sure is cool. I was thinking about putting my own Ryzen based system together in a mITX form factor. Honestly the NUC is fairly reasonably priced by comparison.
It's good if you dont need storage for NAS, I have 2x8 TB + 2x 3TB WD red, they ain't gonna fit XD but it's very interesting to see how efficient things are now
Great Video - I would be interested in understanding how you passthrough the NUC graphics so that a Windows or Ubuntu desktop could use them please?
I would like the NUCs but the normal ones dont have dual NICs
Hi Tim ! Many thanks for your great videos ! Just a little question what file system are you using on the single 1TB SSD drive ? ZFS ? Many thanks for answer :) Best regards from France ;)
Really great to see what intel nuc can achive.
I wounder how effecient it could be with a p31 gold and some low power ram?
Im planing to do a build my self i wanna see if using an unlocked cpu and a motherboard with great voltage control, if its possible to tweak things so you get below 10 watts idle and then having headrooom if or when you need the extra speed. But my use case is off grid solar so even 24 watts idle is a lot likley some linux optimastion and cron jobs to power cycle it can help but everything has its cons and pros :p
"excuse the mess", and I'm like "what mess?" xD
I took a Dell 3070MFF with 32GB RAM for my Proxmox-Server. There ist a Intel Core i5-9500T inside with the 256GB-NVme-SystemDrive and a 1TB SSD from Crucial (MX500) for my VMs. It´s ok for me. A Lenovo m83 is my second Proxmox-Server for Testing and a old Fujitsu P420 is my Proxmox-Backupserver. Good Videos!!! Greetings from Germany!
this is something i've wanted to do for a long time.
Was there ever a followup video? Can't find it.
I did the same, mainserver is a ryzen 5800x with 128g ecc ram and ssd/hdd/nvme zfs pools with a lot of storage, and as backup a nuc11 i3 with 16g ram and nvme...
The only real things you need is high availability pihole+opnsense, to not loose the internet connection if you upgrade/work on the mainserver 🙈
Dunno what you are going todo with 64g ram, and an i7 for a failiver machine 😂
Maybe you can slowly replace your behemoth rack with sth small and more efficient 😂
Will the video you did on GPU passthru work on this? Bought this kit verbatim, it's really nice! Thanks for the video
WAIT! 25 W isn't bad, but my ATX-based server has a 12600K, Z690, 2 x 16 GB RAM, 2 x WD SN770 1TB, 2 x Samsung PM1735 3.2 TB. That thing just consumes 70 W while running a Home Assistant instance and my development Ubuntu Server 24.04.
Maybe I expected a way lower power usage for the mini PC, but I'm a bit disappointed that it's not sitting around 10-15 W as a mac mini would do.
Great video! Hope to be able to do something similar someday soon for a low powered and quiet homelab. Looking forward to more content.
Nice video, your script seemed well thought out. Would like to see if you can get 10gbit working with that over a USB/Thunderbolt adapter, and if so, can it actually fully utilize all 10gbit. Would be a great way to show off iperf3 and how to speed test locally.
Thanks for the idea!
Pairs well with PiKVM in lieu of an IPMI. It's what I use for my non-server grade hardware.