I’ve been planning out a proxmox server for when I eventually have money. (Shut up. It can happen. Shut up!) but I saw something today that got me thinking. Minisforums makes some pretty nice shit at a reasonable price. The entire minis market has actually become pretty great while I wasn’t looking.
I need proxmox hosting opnsense, frigate, jellyfin, homeassistant, BitTorrent, immich, sunshine, steam, and i2pd.
So there are obvious advantages to building my own shit with a trip to microcenter. But maybe these micro machines could actually handle this shit anymore. Opinions?
I run a beelink mini, not the weakest one, not the most powerful one, and it handles docker containers and VMs fine. I don’t have a tkn of integrated storage, but rather this machine handles apps while a separate NAS does all the file storage. Most I ever had running was 2 VMs and a handful of negligible docker containers but I still had plenty of ram and CPU to spare. I also think the minisforum stuff looks good. Their n5 pro nas just came out and would have made a good server with room to grow. I decided against it because I have parts and I want to use them :-) so the beelink is holding down the fort while I Frankenstein together a rig from my old gaming PC in a huge case that will host all my apps and less critical media. Home assistant which will stay on the beelink because it needs high availability. I’ve been curious how the lowest priced minisforum models would fare.
I recently watched a video about Beelink’s factory and was surprised as how high-quality their production process is. Great video. https://youtu.be/ohwI3V207Ts (and if you enable captions, it explains what each process is).