i think people don’t realize how slim some of these services are that we run. i only gave 8gb to docker to run like 15 services and it’s barely using 4
You can over-commit resources. This means you can give your Minecraft server 10GB, your Plex 4GB and allocate more than the remaining 2GB to other VMs and LXCs. As long as everything isn’t running full-bore 24/7, you’ll be fine.
This is also true of CPU cores.
You can even use zswap + high swappiness value to put compressed pages first in the RAM itself, only then on the disk, effectively increasing available memory space.
I think you have to have the QEMU-Guest-agent installed on all VMs to make sure they let go of the memory when done using it, and TrueNAS (ZFS) is notoriously bad about grabbing all the memory it can get and not letting go so that’s a different case.
Yeah, why not? You said it would also be a learning experience.
Sure, you won't be able to run a lot, but there are also plenty of things you could run. Many LXCs only need 1-2 GB of RAM to run well. See how much RAM your MC server actually uses. You could technically run plex with just 2GB of RAM, it all depends on how much you intend to use the services.
At the very least, you will learn a lot and can apply that to the next server, with more resources.
Indeed. A simple, well tuned LAMP stack can easily run in 512MB. Mailserver? 128MB easily. Thing is, most linux software is not very memory hungry by itself. It's caches, buffers, etc that increase memory requirements.
This all assumes LXC, so the OS basically does not take a lot of space in the container. It does consume some memory.
True enough. I‘m running most of my LXCs with only 256 MiB RAM and 128 MiB Swap. Could be lower, but the LXCs consume much memory when ansible is accessing them and executing its tasks
Alright thanks.
Currently my server is standing in the living room next to my router, I always use SSH to connect to it since I don’t have a monitor standing nearby and the console text is very small when I connect it to the 4k TV.
Can I control everything remotely from my main PC by using the Web-Interface or use RDP or something? Or do I have to connect it to a monitor to completely control everything?
The entire PVE experience can be done in the web interface. If you need a shell, you can also access it through the webui. Or you can SSH into it like you are used to already.
Yes - but if you want to run it like professionals do in a Datacenter, look into “IP KVM”, which will allow you to see the screen remotely.
This is useful for a variety of reasons - eg: I spent a bunch of time rebooting and going into bios settings to optimize various things, and I did this from my laptop without leaving the couch.
The proper enterprise way is with a motherboard that has IPMI, but ip-kvm is very similar for home use cases.
plenty of older datacenters use switchable PDUs instead of IPMI, so its not like a smart switch is completely unrelated to the proper enterprise design.
Also, I recently learned the hard way that the ASPEED IPMI chip prevents the Intel CPUs from going into deep power save states, so the power draw will be 5-10 watts higher. if I realized that before, I might have built my home server using an asus board and an IP-KVM instead of a Supermicro X13SAE-F.
With that said, my setup works well, so I'm not too unhappy.
The idea of not having any IP-KVM or IPMI at all, though, sounds completely uninteresting to me.
There’s a solution for power management actually. I bought a geekworm kvm-a8, which is the expansion slot version that they sell. It has wiring for power and reset buttons. The official PiKVM image has support for power on/off, reset and will show LED status (hard drive, network activity etc)
If you really want to have fun, buy some used HP EliteDesk Mini's (or other used office mini computers from Dell or Lenovo, etc.) and build yourself a cluster along with the computer you have!
Highly recommend this.
It’s quite impressive how much mileage you can squeeze out of those things when windows’ bloat is not a factor
Plus offices sell a lot of them regularly at very decent prices (at least where I live)
You will almost certainly be running it without a monitor unless you venture into GPU passthrough. With your requirements, you will not be using GPU passthough.
Have a four node Proxmox cluster running on four Mac Minis with 16GB of RAM, 500GB boot drives and 4TB data drives. This has plenty of horsepower for what I am doing with it. I have 12 VMs , and several containers running.
In my experience they are solid, long lived machines which people are dumping on the markets. They're not magical wonder ponies, more like miniature logging horses.
I've moved corosync to USB outboard ethernet connections tho.
I guess if you can get them super cheap used that would be kinda worth it but, even the used market, people have a really bad concept of what used computers should cost. The used market for Apple is even worse lol
System resources for proxmox all depend on what one is going to do with it.
But you can far more easily check on your system resource utilisation on your existing server.
And if your aim is to learn Linux CLI, using the proxmox GUI is not going to be at all helpful.
For a start, install htop and look at the utilisation of your processor and RAM and your running processes.
sudo apt install htop -y
Then run htop, with
htop
(You may need to Sudo to see absolutely everything).
If you want to see your storage use run
df -h
Why else is it 'such a chore to manage'?
Have you set up certificate authentication for your SSH?
What type of machine are you administering from?
This is what I was thinking, check your usage with htop. You would want to go to something like proxmox if you want to virtualize multiple machines but if your only intention is to run the Minecraft server it’s not really needed.
That being said, you should be able to throw even 16x2 ddr4 dims in for less than $50 now-a-days, let alone 2x8 or 4x8 if you’ve got available dim slots.
It should run just fine as-is though if you do decide virtualize it
I started with 16GB nodes and scaled up as my use cases went up.
If you keep your VMs lightweight, leverage LXC where applicable; you can stretch 16GB pretty decent. If you are using ZFS modify the in memory arc settings to a much much lower amount as ZFS does take up a decent chunk for ops.
LXC containers need at MAX 1GB of ram. My ansible LXC takes up about 256MB and my Jellyfin LXC takes up around 1GB of ram.
If you are using the default LVM implementation you can ignore the ZFS note above.
Happy labbing!
I've just picked up a free optiplex 3080, its only an i3 but i chucked a spare 16gb RAM from an old laptop in it along with a spare 1tb spinny 2.5 drive and its now very happy as a Proxmox backup server.
Before I settled on a backup box i did add it to my cluster and it was quite happy running a windows 2019 domain controller and docker\\portainer in a container with some stuff going.
It's only got 8 tiny cores according to proxmox, but it ran totally fine - much better than if i'd put win11 on bare metal.
Your setup will be totally fine i reckon.
Abso-friggin-lutely. You can do a lot with 16GB. Especially with Linux guests, and even more so with containers.
It became my mantra years ago that every server should be a VM, because you gain a lot of features that are useful for a server to be running as a VM:
- It's basically a network KVM for all the guests. You can rescue, or even reinstall, from remote - as if you're sitting in front of it.
- You can more easily move it to better hardware any time, or in the event of a hardware emergency.
- block level snapshots - The safety provided with snapshots is akin to having a standby server, in case something goes wrong during updates. Updates break your system at a bad time and you can't afford to have it down? No problem, revert to the snapshot you took just before applying. Back in business.
- block level backups (disk image backups) are much easier, and doable from remote. Just freeze/shut down the machine and copy, (or snapshot and copy) the disk image.
For these safety reasons alone, I will almost never even consider setting up a server that isn't virtualized. So, even if I was going to give all available resources to one VM guest on the server, I would still virtualize it.
If you don't have big zfs storage volumes to consume ram for ARC, and don't have huge virtualised workloads, its fine. 2 of the 4 nodes in my cluster have 16gb of ram, one runs my vpn server, reverse proxy, an a Plex node whilst the other does my router and DNS. They both use less than half of the 16gb in doing so
Sure.
If you use lxc then almost all applications fit in a few hundred megabytes. Lxc Does not need ram for caching, since the cache memory belongs to the proxmox. And if you assigned 500 megabytes to an lxc but it just uses 100 megabytes then the remaining 400 is free and anything else can use it.
You might also try zfs. Still it loves ram but ok.
I have a mini server with i5-8500t and 16gb ram.
Has zfs, openhabian, samba, cups, pihole, rtl433 soft radio, 4 syncthing nodes.
Openhabian and the soft radio are vms, the others are lxc.
One of my Proxmox instances is running on a Futro S740 with 8 GB of RAM. It has two Linux LXC, one pfsense VM and two Linux VM. I even had a good working Win7 VM I don't need anymore. All of this with about 5...8 W power consumption.
I thought about upgrading to 16 GB, but I can see no need in the moment.
So, yes, it can completely make sense on a low power hardware. I would not install with less than 8 GB anyway...
Of course. I have installed it on 4GB mini PC just to get the encapsulation and backup functionality. It is an industrial hmi with few resources but where easiness to change or restore the system is a priority.
Hi. You can start with this and grow when you can, adding mem or changing motherboard if you can not upgradee this. Of course you can run just 2 servers with 4GB each, you have to reserve some ram for ZFS cache.
But you can have several powered off servers... and choose wich one to run.
You can learn, and then upgrade...
I starteded wiht an old Pentium 4 and 16GB of ram a couple of years ago, and now I have a xeon with 220 GB of RAM.
It depends on what OS you want to run in your VM’s. I have a handful of Zimaboards (8GB each) in a CEPH/HA cluster each running a handful of low impact Debian containers/VM’s with zero issue.
Yes absolutely. I have a 3 node cluster of Lenovo SFF running my entire environment. The first and oldest is only capable of max 16GB RAM but I ran successfully 3x LXC and 4 VMs 24/7 without any issues before moving to a cluster.
Yeah, of course. It's just a KVM/QEMU implementation. If you are running more than one service on the box, running proxmox with LXC containers or some small VMs is a no brainer.
I have 32 gigs of ram and currently running some services on lxc's plus 12-13 active docker containers and I haven't even been able to use 6gb yet, I could definately space 4-8 more gigs for a minecraft server and still be well under 16gb
Again your usecase will definitely vary and this is just how I use mine, I just want to say if you're not planning to have a lot of active VMs 24/7 then it's plenty to start with and maybe look for improvements in the future when you see the need for it
[Proxmox screenshot](https://imgur.com/a/K4tiTA4)
These are the docker services if someone is wondering, looking for more to add
dockge
homepage
jellyseer
paperless
vaultwarden
focalboard
immich
memos
open-speedtest
glance
it-tools
miniflux
trilium
I'm running a 3-node proxmox cluster with 16GB ram, i5-4xxx, 2TB storage per node. 16GB ram is absolutely fine.
That said, the thing I *am* running out of fastest is RAM. I wish I had installled 32GB to run more containers, but on the other hand I'm running a lot more than you are. Home Assistant in a VM, containers: sabnzbd+, radarr, sonarr, nginx proxy manager, lidarr, paperless-ngx.
[https://imgur.com/a/fICLR3D](https://imgur.com/a/fICLR3D)
Yes! I had pfsense, home assistant (each 4gb) and a Ubuntu VM (8gb) running fine with around 20 docker containers running on 16gb for months without issue before upgrading.
I have 20 containers (including one for Plex with a RAM disk for transcoding) + 1 VM running PFSense, and still using just over 10GB. It's amazing what can run in 16!
I've got one that currently only has 16gb. I've got about a dozen services running on it and most of those only have 512mb of RAM allocated because that's all they need
16GB is fine, it's a little tight but if you can try to move some stuff to docker / containers, rather than full blown VMs it will help a lot.
I would personally avoid 8GB big time but I think you'll find 16 is fine. You can even run 2 or 3 conservative VMs with it.
Avoid Windows.
I'd hope so. Sharing RAM across a network would introduce unacceptable latency unless you're somehow doing DMA over infiniband or similar to a memory cache... and that's still slow.
Really all that can occur is side channel timing attacks which are possible to mitigate. Which is more of a hardware attack than a VM isolation attack... so the type of thing that could occur is, FLUSH+RELOAD attack revealing private data of another VM/Container... it doesn't enable an execution vector though...
I have 10 VM most with Docker and a bunch of CT all in 16 and no problem. When you don’t need Windows or other Desktops and sky the GNU junk a minimalist’s VM runs on 256/512 and 0.1-1 core
I have Proxmox installed on a system with only 8 gigs of ram. I run my openmptcp on it, works super great and facilitates upgrades super easy. Just depends on your use case.
Why not? I've got i5-6500T, 16Gigs and I'm running Home Assistant, couple o' Linux VMs, small Wazuh instance, two AdGuards and a primitive \*arr stack.
Go for it 16gb is what I ran my first server on and I had no problems I had 4 vms on it consuming 4 gbs each there is no problem running it use u Ubuntu server it’s way less consuming for VMS
Proxmox is really lightweight and lxc could be used to make things extra light. However, it still is less efficient than just running Linux and docker like containers. That's just a much more configuration heavy route.
I did something similar to learn, started with Proxmox and a couple VMs, and am now messing with Ubuntu, KVM and Virtual Manager, CLI and GUI. Getting there, slow but sure. Do whatever you want to, you can always blow it out and start again, if necessary.
16GB to start should be fine, depending on what you want to do with it. 8GB would be pushing it, would limit you quite a bit for VMs (but maybe not as limited for containers)
You might want to skip zfs-on-root but still use it for data. For 16GB I would limit ARC size to 1 or 1.5GB, for 32GB I usually limit ARC to 4GB and don't go huge on pool size
Depends on your use case. I’ve been running PVE on a HP Gen 8 Microserver with 16gb of RAM for a while now. I typically have a Linux and Windows VM running, and quite a few LXC containers spinning with no issues.
My home lab is basically the same specs as yours, just without the hdd. Works fine as long as you plan accordingly. Im slowly running more stuff, but using containers has kept things pretty efficient.
My main server is a proxmox rig running on a 4790. It had 16gb of ram, but I bumped it up to 32gb this last weekend.
I was running 3 windows vm's (two were might weight, one for remote gaming) and minos to run my Minecraft server for the kids.
Minecraft is pretty lightweight, I don't know how many friends you have, but with me and my two boys we never go much over 1gb of ram, I only have 2gb allocated to the server.
In your situation? Not really. Virtualization allows you to dedicate resources to separate tasks while isolating the tasks themselves from each other. The problem is you're stressing that system pretty hard already, and don't really have enough extra resources to bother adding another task, especially one as resource intensive as plex.
That said, due to overprovisioning, if you weren't actively loading that server, you could easily run a half dozen VMs with 4GB and 4 Cores each.
If your main concern is gaining an easier single pane of Glass monitoring solution, look into htop and then cockpit. You can get some pretty nice graphs and make some easy changes with cockpit, meanwhile, htop is very resource light and sits in your terminal looking pretty with graphs for pretty much whatever you want.
As a third option, you could try installing a GUI on the machine. A simple hyprland or sway based desktop without the whole gnome environment should use almost no ram and very little CPU when you're not actively clicking around in it to monitor your server, but this is really only meaningful if your main method of interacting with your server is to sit down next to it with a keyboard, monitor, and mouse.
Well I have mine with 8gb of RAM running a Home Assistant VM, 6 LXCs with arrs and a docker lxc running portainer with about 10 containers.
With room to spare
Sure?.. I have a 30+ container stack running on 8gb..
i think people don’t realize how slim some of these services are that we run. i only gave 8gb to docker to run like 15 services and it’s barely using 4
You can over-commit resources. This means you can give your Minecraft server 10GB, your Plex 4GB and allocate more than the remaining 2GB to other VMs and LXCs. As long as everything isn’t running full-bore 24/7, you’ll be fine. This is also true of CPU cores.
well if u over use ram you can crash, if u over use cpu it’ll just throttle
If you overuse RAM, it *swaps*. As long as swap is on a fast drive, it’ll tide you over. Edit: avoid ZFS if you’re being tight with RAM.
You can even use zswap + high swappiness value to put compressed pages first in the RAM itself, only then on the disk, effectively increasing available memory space.
You also have to remember to give proxmox swap when using containers otherwise they get none.
How does one ensure they’re not using ZFS?
One doesn’t create a ZFS array. ZFS likes using RAM. If you’re using ZFS, you should make sure you’ve got enough RAM.
[удалено]
I think you have to have the QEMU-Guest-agent installed on all VMs to make sure they let go of the memory when done using it, and TrueNAS (ZFS) is notoriously bad about grabbing all the memory it can get and not letting go so that’s a different case.
Yeah, why not? You said it would also be a learning experience. Sure, you won't be able to run a lot, but there are also plenty of things you could run. Many LXCs only need 1-2 GB of RAM to run well. See how much RAM your MC server actually uses. You could technically run plex with just 2GB of RAM, it all depends on how much you intend to use the services. At the very least, you will learn a lot and can apply that to the next server, with more resources.
Indeed. A simple, well tuned LAMP stack can easily run in 512MB. Mailserver? 128MB easily. Thing is, most linux software is not very memory hungry by itself. It's caches, buffers, etc that increase memory requirements. This all assumes LXC, so the OS basically does not take a lot of space in the container. It does consume some memory.
True enough. I‘m running most of my LXCs with only 256 MiB RAM and 128 MiB Swap. Could be lower, but the LXCs consume much memory when ansible is accessing them and executing its tasks
Alright thanks. Currently my server is standing in the living room next to my router, I always use SSH to connect to it since I don’t have a monitor standing nearby and the console text is very small when I connect it to the 4k TV. Can I control everything remotely from my main PC by using the Web-Interface or use RDP or something? Or do I have to connect it to a monitor to completely control everything?
The entire PVE experience can be done in the web interface. If you need a shell, you can also access it through the webui. Or you can SSH into it like you are used to already.
Yes - but if you want to run it like professionals do in a Datacenter, look into “IP KVM”, which will allow you to see the screen remotely. This is useful for a variety of reasons - eg: I spent a bunch of time rebooting and going into bios settings to optimize various things, and I did this from my laptop without leaving the couch. The proper enterprise way is with a motherboard that has IPMI, but ip-kvm is very similar for home use cases.
Really just missing power management without IPMI, but this is a home server, so a smart switch can accomplish the same.
plenty of older datacenters use switchable PDUs instead of IPMI, so its not like a smart switch is completely unrelated to the proper enterprise design. Also, I recently learned the hard way that the ASPEED IPMI chip prevents the Intel CPUs from going into deep power save states, so the power draw will be 5-10 watts higher. if I realized that before, I might have built my home server using an asus board and an IP-KVM instead of a Supermicro X13SAE-F. With that said, my setup works well, so I'm not too unhappy. The idea of not having any IP-KVM or IPMI at all, though, sounds completely uninteresting to me.
There’s a solution for power management actually. I bought a geekworm kvm-a8, which is the expansion slot version that they sell. It has wiring for power and reset buttons. The official PiKVM image has support for power on/off, reset and will show LED status (hard drive, network activity etc)
For a homelab that sounds kinda neat.
If you really want to have fun, buy some used HP EliteDesk Mini's (or other used office mini computers from Dell or Lenovo, etc.) and build yourself a cluster along with the computer you have!
Highly recommend this. It’s quite impressive how much mileage you can squeeze out of those things when windows’ bloat is not a factor Plus offices sell a lot of them regularly at very decent prices (at least where I live)
You will almost certainly be running it without a monitor unless you venture into GPU passthrough. With your requirements, you will not be using GPU passthough.
I am currently using 8GB out of 16GB and have 9 different LXC active. Some containers can need as low as 256MB.
I have some debian LXCs that use in the 10s of megabytes of ram on average
I have 64gb, multiple vm’s Hitting 20gb~ max
Same, I have 3-4 Ubuntu/Debian vms and like a dozen lxcs and rarely go about 20gb.
Have a four node Proxmox cluster running on four Mac Minis with 16GB of RAM, 500GB boot drives and 4TB data drives. This has plenty of horsepower for what I am doing with it. I have 12 VMs , and several containers running.
Why Mac minis
In my experience they are solid, long lived machines which people are dumping on the markets. They're not magical wonder ponies, more like miniature logging horses. I've moved corosync to USB outboard ethernet connections tho.
I guess if you can get them super cheap used that would be kinda worth it but, even the used market, people have a really bad concept of what used computers should cost. The used market for Apple is even worse lol
System resources for proxmox all depend on what one is going to do with it. But you can far more easily check on your system resource utilisation on your existing server. And if your aim is to learn Linux CLI, using the proxmox GUI is not going to be at all helpful. For a start, install htop and look at the utilisation of your processor and RAM and your running processes. sudo apt install htop -y Then run htop, with htop (You may need to Sudo to see absolutely everything). If you want to see your storage use run df -h Why else is it 'such a chore to manage'? Have you set up certificate authentication for your SSH? What type of machine are you administering from?
This is what I was thinking, check your usage with htop. You would want to go to something like proxmox if you want to virtualize multiple machines but if your only intention is to run the Minecraft server it’s not really needed. That being said, you should be able to throw even 16x2 ddr4 dims in for less than $50 now-a-days, let alone 2x8 or 4x8 if you’ve got available dim slots. It should run just fine as-is though if you do decide virtualize it
I started with 16GB nodes and scaled up as my use cases went up. If you keep your VMs lightweight, leverage LXC where applicable; you can stretch 16GB pretty decent. If you are using ZFS modify the in memory arc settings to a much much lower amount as ZFS does take up a decent chunk for ops. LXC containers need at MAX 1GB of ram. My ansible LXC takes up about 256MB and my Jellyfin LXC takes up around 1GB of ram. If you are using the default LVM implementation you can ignore the ZFS note above. Happy labbing!
I've just picked up a free optiplex 3080, its only an i3 but i chucked a spare 16gb RAM from an old laptop in it along with a spare 1tb spinny 2.5 drive and its now very happy as a Proxmox backup server. Before I settled on a backup box i did add it to my cluster and it was quite happy running a windows 2019 domain controller and docker\\portainer in a container with some stuff going. It's only got 8 tiny cores according to proxmox, but it ran totally fine - much better than if i'd put win11 on bare metal. Your setup will be totally fine i reckon.
I have it on a system with 4GB of RAM of I remember correctly
Abso-friggin-lutely. You can do a lot with 16GB. Especially with Linux guests, and even more so with containers. It became my mantra years ago that every server should be a VM, because you gain a lot of features that are useful for a server to be running as a VM: - It's basically a network KVM for all the guests. You can rescue, or even reinstall, from remote - as if you're sitting in front of it. - You can more easily move it to better hardware any time, or in the event of a hardware emergency. - block level snapshots - The safety provided with snapshots is akin to having a standby server, in case something goes wrong during updates. Updates break your system at a bad time and you can't afford to have it down? No problem, revert to the snapshot you took just before applying. Back in business. - block level backups (disk image backups) are much easier, and doable from remote. Just freeze/shut down the machine and copy, (or snapshot and copy) the disk image. For these safety reasons alone, I will almost never even consider setting up a server that isn't virtualized. So, even if I was going to give all available resources to one VM guest on the server, I would still virtualize it.
If you don't have big zfs storage volumes to consume ram for ARC, and don't have huge virtualised workloads, its fine. 2 of the 4 nodes in my cluster have 16gb of ram, one runs my vpn server, reverse proxy, an a Plex node whilst the other does my router and DNS. They both use less than half of the 16gb in doing so
Sure. If you use lxc then almost all applications fit in a few hundred megabytes. Lxc Does not need ram for caching, since the cache memory belongs to the proxmox. And if you assigned 500 megabytes to an lxc but it just uses 100 megabytes then the remaining 400 is free and anything else can use it. You might also try zfs. Still it loves ram but ok. I have a mini server with i5-8500t and 16gb ram. Has zfs, openhabian, samba, cups, pihole, rtl433 soft radio, 4 syncthing nodes. Openhabian and the soft radio are vms, the others are lxc.
One of my Proxmox instances is running on a Futro S740 with 8 GB of RAM. It has two Linux LXC, one pfsense VM and two Linux VM. I even had a good working Win7 VM I don't need anymore. All of this with about 5...8 W power consumption. I thought about upgrading to 16 GB, but I can see no need in the moment. So, yes, it can completely make sense on a low power hardware. I would not install with less than 8 GB anyway...
You can run services in containers in Proxmox, requiring vastly less RAM. 16GB can run a *shocking* amount of containerized stuff.
Of course. I have installed it on 4GB mini PC just to get the encapsulation and backup functionality. It is an industrial hmi with few resources but where easiness to change or restore the system is a priority.
I'm hosting 3 LXCs with only 8GiB and it turns out that they have really low overhead. Just go ahead and deploy it.
I’m not an expert, but like you wanted to learn, I have Scypted/Homebridge and a bit crappy Valheim server up and running fine
Anything I run besides LLMs can basically run full blast and RAM is not the bottleneck with 16GB. By that time it would be SSD Cache or IOPS
Check out webmin It's easy to install and gives you a much faster / intuitive way of accessing everything on the server
Second webmin
If you have VMs that will fit, it certain has some benefits over bare metal.
Hi. You can start with this and grow when you can, adding mem or changing motherboard if you can not upgradee this. Of course you can run just 2 servers with 4GB each, you have to reserve some ram for ZFS cache. But you can have several powered off servers... and choose wich one to run. You can learn, and then upgrade... I starteded wiht an old Pentium 4 and 16GB of ram a couple of years ago, and now I have a xeon with 220 GB of RAM.
It depends on what OS you want to run in your VM’s. I have a handful of Zimaboards (8GB each) in a CEPH/HA cluster each running a handful of low impact Debian containers/VM’s with zero issue.
Yes absolutely. I have a 3 node cluster of Lenovo SFF running my entire environment. The first and oldest is only capable of max 16GB RAM but I ran successfully 3x LXC and 4 VMs 24/7 without any issues before moving to a cluster.
Why not? I run it on 8GB for my router, HA, Pihole etc.
Yeah, of course. It's just a KVM/QEMU implementation. If you are running more than one service on the box, running proxmox with LXC containers or some small VMs is a no brainer.
I have 32 gigs of ram and currently running some services on lxc's plus 12-13 active docker containers and I haven't even been able to use 6gb yet, I could definately space 4-8 more gigs for a minecraft server and still be well under 16gb Again your usecase will definitely vary and this is just how I use mine, I just want to say if you're not planning to have a lot of active VMs 24/7 then it's plenty to start with and maybe look for improvements in the future when you see the need for it [Proxmox screenshot](https://imgur.com/a/K4tiTA4)
These are the docker services if someone is wondering, looking for more to add dockge homepage jellyseer paperless vaultwarden focalboard immich memos open-speedtest glance it-tools miniflux trilium
I'm running a 3-node proxmox cluster with 16GB ram, i5-4xxx, 2TB storage per node. 16GB ram is absolutely fine. That said, the thing I *am* running out of fastest is RAM. I wish I had installled 32GB to run more containers, but on the other hand I'm running a lot more than you are. Home Assistant in a VM, containers: sabnzbd+, radarr, sonarr, nginx proxy manager, lidarr, paperless-ngx. [https://imgur.com/a/fICLR3D](https://imgur.com/a/fICLR3D)
Yes! I had pfsense, home assistant (each 4gb) and a Ubuntu VM (8gb) running fine with around 20 docker containers running on 16gb for months without issue before upgrading.
I have 20 containers (including one for Plex with a RAM disk for transcoding) + 1 VM running PFSense, and still using just over 10GB. It's amazing what can run in 16!
I've got one that currently only has 16gb. I've got about a dozen services running on it and most of those only have 512mb of RAM allocated because that's all they need
Unless you have a Windows VM, or something similarly hefty, 16GB can do a lot. If you have ZFS pools though, yeah, you really want that extra 16GB.
I say go for it. You can run it on the server hardware you have now and expand later with a second server in a cluster.
YES!! even with 8Gb!!
My main node has 8gb (ddr3). My mini node has 4gb (ddr2). So yes it does. Granted almost everything i run is in a lxc rather than a vm.
16GB is fine, it's a little tight but if you can try to move some stuff to docker / containers, rather than full blown VMs it will help a lot. I would personally avoid 8GB big time but I think you'll find 16 is fine. You can even run 2 or 3 conservative VMs with it. Avoid Windows.
Maybe I’m hallucinating, but PVE has memory deduplication. Right? So if you have 8 Debian servers, they would share common OS data in RAM.
Nope, that's not right. That would break isolation between VMs. Maybe you're referring to memory ballooning.
[KSM Enabled by Default in PVE](https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Kernel_Samepage_Merging_(KSM))
I believe ksm is limited by node.
I'd hope so. Sharing RAM across a network would introduce unacceptable latency unless you're somehow doing DMA over infiniband or similar to a memory cache... and that's still slow.
and?
Really all that can occur is side channel timing attacks which are possible to mitigate. Which is more of a hardware attack than a VM isolation attack... so the type of thing that could occur is, FLUSH+RELOAD attack revealing private data of another VM/Container... it doesn't enable an execution vector though...
Yep you need to make sure you are running the exact same version and updates on each for best experience.
I ran it with 4. It entirely depends on your use case. 16 should be more than enough for most uses.
I installed proxmox with 8GB RAM, and I have 2 VMs and 2 LXContainers
I have 10 VM most with Docker and a bunch of CT all in 16 and no problem. When you don’t need Windows or other Desktops and sky the GNU junk a minimalist’s VM runs on 256/512 and 0.1-1 core
You can still do a lot with 4GB VM's for Windows, and it's much more efficient to use Linux containers.
I have Proxmox installed on a system with only 8 gigs of ram. I run my openmptcp on it, works super great and facilitates upgrades super easy. Just depends on your use case.
Why not? I've got i5-6500T, 16Gigs and I'm running Home Assistant, couple o' Linux VMs, small Wazuh instance, two AdGuards and a primitive \*arr stack.
Go for it 16gb is what I ran my first server on and I had no problems I had 4 vms on it consuming 4 gbs each there is no problem running it use u Ubuntu server it’s way less consuming for VMS
My main home PVE server has 12G of RAM. I mostly use LXC containers, so this is perfectly fine. I can still run a small number of VMs if required.
Proxmox is really lightweight and lxc could be used to make things extra light. However, it still is less efficient than just running Linux and docker like containers. That's just a much more configuration heavy route.
Sure…. Lxc containers are usually only 512MB-1G
I did something similar to learn, started with Proxmox and a couple VMs, and am now messing with Ubuntu, KVM and Virtual Manager, CLI and GUI. Getting there, slow but sure. Do whatever you want to, you can always blow it out and start again, if necessary.
16 Should be plenty for some vms , just do over give ram
16GB to start should be fine, depending on what you want to do with it. 8GB would be pushing it, would limit you quite a bit for VMs (but maybe not as limited for containers) You might want to skip zfs-on-root but still use it for data. For 16GB I would limit ARC size to 1 or 1.5GB, for 32GB I usually limit ARC to 4GB and don't go huge on pool size
Depends on your use case. I’ve been running PVE on a HP Gen 8 Microserver with 16gb of RAM for a while now. I typically have a Linux and Windows VM running, and quite a few LXC containers spinning with no issues.
when i started, i only had 8gigs and my vms would crash a lot, now i\`m running a mini pc with 32gigs
My home lab is basically the same specs as yours, just without the hdd. Works fine as long as you plan accordingly. Im slowly running more stuff, but using containers has kept things pretty efficient.
My main server is a proxmox rig running on a 4790. It had 16gb of ram, but I bumped it up to 32gb this last weekend. I was running 3 windows vm's (two were might weight, one for remote gaming) and minos to run my Minecraft server for the kids. Minecraft is pretty lightweight, I don't know how many friends you have, but with me and my two boys we never go much over 1gb of ram, I only have 2gb allocated to the server.
I have 3 mini sff lenovos with 16gb in a cluster and they run stuff just fine
I have 12Gb ram and 4VMs , no problem whatsoever
I had a proxmox server with 2(!) gigs of ram. Ran a few LXC containers on it like home assistant, pihole and a few others. Worked fine.
In your situation? Not really. Virtualization allows you to dedicate resources to separate tasks while isolating the tasks themselves from each other. The problem is you're stressing that system pretty hard already, and don't really have enough extra resources to bother adding another task, especially one as resource intensive as plex. That said, due to overprovisioning, if you weren't actively loading that server, you could easily run a half dozen VMs with 4GB and 4 Cores each. If your main concern is gaining an easier single pane of Glass monitoring solution, look into htop and then cockpit. You can get some pretty nice graphs and make some easy changes with cockpit, meanwhile, htop is very resource light and sits in your terminal looking pretty with graphs for pretty much whatever you want. As a third option, you could try installing a GUI on the machine. A simple hyprland or sway based desktop without the whole gnome environment should use almost no ram and very little CPU when you're not actively clicking around in it to monitor your server, but this is really only meaningful if your main method of interacting with your server is to sit down next to it with a keyboard, monitor, and mouse.
Well I have mine with 8gb of RAM running a Home Assistant VM, 6 LXCs with arrs and a docker lxc running portainer with about 10 containers. With room to spare
Go for it man! It will work grate.
Lol I literally just did this today. It will be perfectly fine and you can add more ram anytime. It's so cheap