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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

> …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) 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), and the TBS-h574TX. Or you can just throw SATA SSDs into any NAS.

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These NASbooks are sooooo close to what I want!

My problem is that none of them have an internal power supply. They all require a power adapter that's decidedly less easy to source than an IEC cord. I have had 3 separate experiences where I give someone instructions to grab a box and the power adapter... and they show up with the box and without the power adapter (or with a power adapter in a box of similar power adapters and no volt/amp/size rating on the box to disambiguate). In short, the internal power supply is something I actually care about.

It's harder and harder to find small computers with internal power, because they've found that nobody counts the power brick in the "size" (remember the original Xbox?).

The best bet might be to wait until they've all finalized on USB-C.

Yep, that's probably how it has to be. Hopefully USB4NET can save us from "gigabit ethernet is enough for everyone," too.

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.

If you just need to run a few containers, you might want to take a look at TrueNas (Scale) rather than Proxmox.

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.

> ... 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? :)

Great question! I haven't gotten that far yet. I have Proxmox running on a 12th gen i5 currently, and my other two compute nodes, a 3rd gen i7 laptop and a 7th gen i5, are currently still serving production workloads, so I haven't had a chance to set up a cluster yet. That said, I don't mind limiting features to lowest common denominator for the k3s control plane node, as I don't need gobs of power for it or advanced CPU features, and I imagine that's the pain you might be facing (though I'm new to Proxmox, so who can say?)

That said, I do have a NAS that I can provide both NFS and iSCSI storage to, so I imagine if I run NFS as the backing storage, I shouldn't have to worry about clustered file systems. Each compute does have local storage, but the plan is to provide that via a CSI for workloads that don't need to be highly available or where fault tolerance isn't a concern.

As a data point, the vm migration hangs aren't happening in testing any more. Looks like there really was a fix added to Proxmox recently.

Can proceed with more testing now. :)

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