Show us your home lab

[nst68]

I guess it depends on how much you're planning to stress the system. If you're going to be doing IDS and all that on *sense and have a fast internet connection then you're not going to regret the extra performance of the N305. The only thing that puts me off these tiny cases and the N305 is the extra heat they have the potential to generate. I've seen models completely passively cooled and some than have a small fan. Because I only run it as a router appliance in my sitting room I need passively cooled and so would feel "safer" with an N100. But if I was OK with actively cooled then I'd definitely look at the N305 as the price difference has shrunk a lot and depending on the application you can get twice the performance.

When I ran HA and Z2M containerised on my old UnRaid box the CPU never seemed stressed and that was an old 6th Gen i5 I think. I don't think they'll need the extra grunt. I'm not au fait with Proxmox so no idea how much overhead the hypervisor needs. RAM might be an issue - I think the two chips have different capabilities with addressable RAM from memory if that's important to you.

I'm hopefully moving house in a few months and will need to decide where to put the machine, I don't want to have to add a fan if I can help it.

tbh I'm only going to use Proxmox as I fancy trying something different
it's probably way overkill for what I'm using it for.

 

[Bluecube]

A system that's so venerable that I'm beginning to forget what's actually in there... The big box is my Unraid server running with a Ryzen 2700x, 32Gb, 3x6Tb HDDs and two SSDs. There's a Proxmox server on a Lenovo mini PC hidden at the bottom running Home Assistant with a couple of play about VMs. The UDM is hooked up to a U6-Pro sitting on a 3D printed stand. It may be upside down but area coverage is great! Everything is plugged into a APC UPS.

 

[TechMinerUK]

That’s a hell of a lot going on in a home lab. The MS-01s do look pretty cool, be sure to get some images and info up when you get them running.

How to you monitor what each system is doing, resources used etc? You use something like loggly?

As promised, I finally managed to get them setup in a cluster

They are bigger than the HP/Dell/Lenovo mini units but smaller than a home router, they're quite chunky and fairly weighty!

Connectivity on them is nothing to be sniffed at either, I've wacked in an i350 x4 card in each and hooked up the 10G ports to my switch, still have the 2.5G ports to play with once I can get my hands on a 2.5G switch that won't cost me my kidneys

 

[Andrew Moore]

As promised, I finally managed to get them setup in a cluster

They are bigger than the HP/Dell/Lenovo mini units but smaller than a home router, they're quite chunky and fairly weighty!

Connectivity on them is nothing to be sniffed at either, I've wacked in an i350 x4 card in each and hooked up the 10G ports to my switch, still have the 2.5G ports to play with once I can get my hands on a 2.5G switch that won't cost me my kidneys

Wow they're tiny for what they contain! Let us know how you get on with them as I have been looking and am quite tempted.

 

[TechMinerUK]

Wow they're tiny for what they contain! Let us know how you get on with them as I have been looking and am quite tempted.

They are surprisingly tiny!

I did a little bit of a write up over here https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/minisforum-ms-01-owners-thread.18987883/ of my first experience with them, hopefully as more people get them it'll start a bit of a chain like the T20s and Microservers have but overall I think they are pretty decent albeit there is some lacking in refinement but considering it is very much designed with labbing in mind it's a worth while trade for whats inside.

I think my biggest bug bear with them if I had to pick one would be the random speed up of the fans, every now and then I will setup a new VM and it will give it the beans for about 10 seconds before ramping down again but having said that I have seen some actual rackmount HP and Dell units do that at work so maybe I'm just being petty