Thinking of upgrading my homelab, just detailing it here so I can get some reference numbers easily.
There are a couple reasons for this, mainly space efficiency and power efficiency.
This will cut down overall space and power usage, both the amount of plugs I am using in a power board but also the overall power requirements. In terms of space it is saving, I will be replacing 3 seperate “mini” pc’s to all be consolidated into this one.
Another current limiting factor is that I cannot use any 3.5 inch harddrives, reducing my storage options. Another limiting factor is that I have no upgrade space, I cannot use more parts for my homelab currently. This should provide a better base for upgrades.
Overall software architecture would be running PBS on the same hardware but virtualized in Proxmox. The instance would back itself up and all other VMs in Proxmox, with 2 directly attached 3.5 HDDs, probably with EXT4 or maybe ZFS? Either way works for me. Just to have 2 drive redundancy, running mirrored so that I don’t lose backups if one shits itself.
The other HDD’s are then for media storage or vm disks, just anything that doesn’t need super speed.
Then we have the 3 NVMe’s, which will be in ZFS RAIDZ1, single parity, which will house Proxmox itself, and the other VMs that need good speed.
And now the other main reason for doing this, being able to run 2 RTX 2000 Ada Generation cards at the same time, doubling my available VRAM from 16GiB to 32GiB, allowing me to run much bigger models which is exciting, as well as my system memory can now actually be ECC, with 4 slots of DDR5 so my actual in production memory can be increased by a lot.
Replacing:
- 1×PBS Server
- 2×PVE Servers
New Build:
- ($280) ASUS TUF Gaming B860M-PLUS WiFi LGA1851 mATX Desktop Motherboard
- PCIe5×16, PCIe4×4
- Noctua NH-L9i
- ($145) Jonsbo N4 - SFF 19.6L mATX 6+2-Bay NAS
- Total size at about 286mm(W)×300mm(D)×228mm(H)
- ($FREE) Intel(R) Core(TM) Ultra 7 265
- ($FREE) 2×NVIDIA RTX 2000 Ada Generation
- One in the PCIe5×16 slot, and one in the PCIe4×4 slot, specifically for
llama.cppinferencing. - (15$) Will also need to buy a new SFF low profile backplate/bracket
- One in the PCIe5×16 slot, and one in the PCIe4×4 slot, specifically for
- ($270) Corsair SF750 - 750W Platinum SFX Modular PSU
- ($FREE) 4×16GiB DDR5 5600 ECC Memory
- ($FREE) 6×8TiB HDD
- ($FREE) 3xNVMe 970 1TiB SSD
$710 total