I used a Zotac CI323 Nano with two ethernet ports and proxmox to build a all-in-one home router. The virtual machines are OPNsense as Firewall, pihole for adblocking and iobroker for my home automation. it runs fine with 8GB RAM for a small home network and using LXC containers for pihole and iobroker helps saving memory resources. Also backing up the vms is super easy.

I've bought dozens of these boxes over the years for everything from home assistant servers, remote desktop PCs for maintenance of onsite systems, node red servers, etc etc. They really are great and can be bought for less than a pi depending on spec. Another advantage over other options is that these fit nicely into a rack. I usually use a 1U rack shelf and sit these on. they look neat with the rest of the rack.

Been using this for long and have no regrets. Proxmox and docker creates so many more possibilities. media centers, dns, adguard, pihole and many more

I decided to get a Thinkcentre M900 with an i5-6500T, 8GB RAM. Had old SSD and HDD to put into it, and now I have a pretty powerful (for my use case) server. Got it for around $75 off of eBay. I'd say it's money well spent. I have tens of Docker containers running on it, on top of AlmaLinux 9, accessible through cloudflare tunnel. Everything runs smoothly, and being x86_64, I don't have to worry about software support and such.

Tip: I often buy laptops with broken screens for dirt cheap (i5, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD for 30 CHF). Not only it runs no problem for server tasks, same as the machine on the video, but on top it has built-in ups :)

Great video. I have some cases full of these MFF pc's with 8th gen i5 processors and 16GB DDR4. Finally got a use case for using these. Also runs ProxMox fine with no slowdowns. A good tip is to check that the computers have the latest BIOS updates provided. Some of these Micro pc's can run from a smaller, more efficient PSU.

Yep, did exactly this. SSD included. Good RAM. And well built!

As always, great video. I moved to tiny micro PCs for my home server back in 2019. I remember with an i7 processor, it was like being on a jet engine, super fast compared to a raspberry pi. Also, backup and recovery staff are superfast. I will never regret my great move. 😊

I really like your videos. Thanks for the awesome work. Just one word of caution: Whenever it comes to power saving, the TDP is often used to decide which hardware to use. I learned it myself the hard way. My two server systems A2SDi-16C-HLN4F (32W TDP CPU) and A2SDi-8C+-HLN4F (25W TDP CPU) come not even close to 30 Watt power usage. Platform power saving feature support is way more important than the TDP numbers… Apart from choosing your hardware wisely, there are also BIOS and software settings to take care of. That is the main reason I am writing this comment. I think that there may be some potential to save even more power… To achieve the power consumption I mentioned further down I did the following: Used a pico PSU. Be careful: in my system it only supported 2 nvme ssds. But in this way I saved between 10-15 watts compared to my Gold rated SFX and ATX PSUs I made a video going trough all BIOS settings pages to “remember” the state without any changes. And later a second video recording all the changes I made:) I updated the BIOS to the most recent version. I loaded the BIOS default to have a reference point. In BIOS switched c-states on and selected the highest c-state number available In BIOS switched p-states / package p-states and selected the highest number In BIOS I enabled ASPM for all available pcie and chipset devices In BIOS I turned ACPI on Removed all pcie cards and other not crucial devices - just to make finding problems more easy… In proxmox I installed the following packages powertop, i7z, cpufrequtils, acpi-support, acpid, api Ran powertop and tab trough the pages. Kept an eye on the p- and c-states as well as the “bad” entries. Then ran powertop - -autotune. That did drop the power usage quite a bit. Ran cpufreq-info. Here you can see what frequencies the cores are running and what cpu governor is used (was “performance” in my case) Changed the governor to “powersave” or “ondemand”. In one of my systems “powersave” would not allow the cpu to go over the minimum frequency. There you can also see whether your system is using intel-p-state driver or ACPI driver It may be worth it to edit the /etc/default/grub to make the system use ACPI OR p-states I put the hdd to sleep with hdparm. Yes I am aware that this may not be suitable for every setup One by one added the components back in the system and looked at the changes that made to power consumption My system automatically switched from p-state driver to ACPI after installing the ACPI support. This resulted in less power usage. After doing the above settings, my system is using less than half of the power in comparison to running “stock” BIOS settings and “stock” proxmox. For about one week I am now using my new “server”: ASROCK H670m-itx, 64 GB RAM, i5-12400, 2 nvme ssds, one 12 TB Ironwolf pro all powered by a pico PSU. With the hdd running the system uses around 22 W. I put the hdd the sleep most of the time, because I just use it once an week for backing up my data to an additional drive. In this state the system uses between 15 and 17 W. The board as an Intel 1 GbE Nic and a Realtek 2,5 GbE one. Power measurements were done with either one connected. If I put an Intel dual i710 10 GbE NIC in my server idle power goes up around 10 W. Unfortunately my mainboard does not handle pcie power saving well. ASPM is not fully support. That issue I will have to investigate. Maybe I will contact ASROCK. I suspect it is a BIOS or BIOS setting issue. As for the Realtek NIC… I turned it of, because it was giving me a really hard time in proxmox using docker containers. The containers would randomly drop the connection making them inaccessible. It took me quite some time before I realised the Realtek NIC was to blame and not the reverse proxy configuration I was trying to set up… I then tried out a GigaByte B660i mainboard which as an Intel 225V NIC. That NIC on that specific board was using over 8 watts when there was close to no network traffic (just the proxmox web interface and no vm running). This board was handling pcie power saving better, but had general stability issues and only has one nvme slot. So I stayed with my ASROCK board. Whether 10GbE, an Intel 2,5 GbE card or just 1 GbE will be used I still have to decide. I also tried an Aquantia based 10 GbE card. It seemed to work ok in proxmox that is (vsphere is a different story) but the Intel card uses about the same power and gives more features (SR-IOV and hardware offloading). This server replaced my Supermicro servers. My systems were running proxmox and later vmware vsphere. As prices for electricity are going really up, I got rid of my cluster (3 nodes). Spending over 85 W combined when the machines were idle was getting too expensive for just playing around. So from now on I will be using just one server. My problem with the server hardware was, that it was not possible to push the servers under 30 watts in idle. I went trough all the settings in the BIOS, turned off network cards and even cores hovering at the 30 W mark. The remote management alone is using between 5 and 8 watts of power. When I build the systems 5 years ago, everyone told me I should use server hardware. Remote management, ECC RAM and better stability sounded good at that time. Stability was not an issue in the 5 years. As for ECC RAM not a single error was reported on the machines… But I noticed that many of the power saving options my consumer hardware was giving me weren’t available on my servers. My HPE Microserver Gen10plus would not work with ACPI… even if I did all the step above and edited the grub file to disable intel p-states… That BIOS is quite special and some power saving settings are not available. The HPE ILO5 is using also around 8 W. After all the optimisations the Microserver was using approximately 20 W. Another minus for me: HPE disabled the integrated GPU of the processor. This is done in hardware. There is no way to enable the igpu. I wanted to have some gpu acceleration available. If that wasn’t the case I would not have bought new hardware. Again something I learned after buying the server. You have to use ILO remote, a VGA monitor or adaptor to setup that machine. The display port is connected to the ILO gpu (matrox) and only works in Windows or Linux after installing the drivers… So I decided to use consumer hardware for the next HOME server. No remote management or ECC support on my platform. As for remote management I can use pikvm to add that feature. The pi will do that job excellently and uses only 2-3 W while doing so. And for ECC I just cross my fingers that it will be a no issue as it was in the past. And if hardware disaster strikes I still do have way to much hardware in my “homelab” to quickly setup a backup machine. But what I think it is more likely, that I make some stupid configurations while playing around and will have to use one of my backups with “known good states” of my software setup :). Im looking forward for the next video. 😃

I've been using refurbished "mini PCs" for years instead of RPis because of the more reliable storage setup (and CPU options in cases where performance is a factor). I usually spend the few extra bucks for a new replacement SSD. For these refurbished units it's really important to test them fully. I've had iffy memory and out of 10+ systems, one had an intermittent motherboard issue. I'd add to the list at 9:24 that updating the BIOS is a must.

Thank you for great overview.. seems that this way solves many near future issues of mine in an ecosystem with weather stations, telescope control etc.

i also upgraded from the pi's to the thinclients. have been running a m73 with docker containers for years. it has been working flawless.

I bought a pile of 8 identical thinkcentres last year when PI's started to become scarce and overpriced. I think i paid roughly $70 each with no HD. So far so good and i have them all maxed out on memory. They make for great little servers and desktops. No issues and highly stable. I have a nice little cluster going that is a mix of thinkcenters and RPIs.

Very timely for me, just last week I bought a Wyse 5060 to do just this and reclaim the Pi currently running HA for something where the smaller size and GPIO are an advantage.

Kind of an amazing find. I have only bought one PI so I will be looking into these mini servers.

Thanks, as always, Andreas! I always learn something new. This time ProxMox, PiBuilder and IOTStack. I just last week migrated from a Pi-4 to an old MacMini 2011 running Debian 11 Bullseye and HA Supervised. I can hear my footsteps echoing down the halls of this empty minicomputer mansion with one little home assistant instance running in a watercloset. Time to load it up with more apps. 73s

So much fun reading everyone's setup for home assistant OTHER than raspberry. I always thought raspberry was the holy grail for HA just because of community support and it's popularity. From the comments here I got a very different story. Just a week after I finally decided not to wait for the raspberries to become available again and go with a cheap NUC. All your comments work great to prevent buyers remorse.😁😁

I bought an old Thinkpad T430 for this which gives me a battery backup as well. And it has bt, wifi, slots for 2 sata drives. It runs my mail server, websites, hass, pleroma (mastodon alternative) and a lot more... on top of that I used it as emergency workstation when my main pc broke down. I could run Windows VM on it with igpu passthrough. And the total cost was 60 for the laptop, 20 for ram upgrade to 16G and storage SSDs which I already had.

Excellent video, very good format, the style and substance will build this channel. Thanks you for posting ! Thank you to the YT algo for suggesting this segment !! And thank you especially for all the great comments and subscribers, this is a warehouse of very smart people !!

My tiny Lenovo additionally runs LXC-containers for LMS(Squeezebox-Server), Unify, Pihole and Edomi-Visu. Edomi ist available as a Proxmox-LXC-Container template from knx-user-forum, which is ready to use out of the box and can be installed in a minute. Everything is nicely separated and one application will not compromise the others in case anything goes wrong. All my raspies have been retired a year ago and I never want to go back ... Thanks for great videos, always inspiring!

I have been playing with these "1L" low-TDP boxes for about a month now and I too was surprised by how fast they are! Managed to get two Lenovo M900 (i5-6500T) for $75 CDN but usually these are ~$250+CDN but the cheapest Pi4/8GB(kit) I was able to get in Canada a few months ago was $300 CDN so "1L" PCs are a better deal IMHO. Oh, and yes, Proxmox is fantastic!

I have been trying to solve the PI issue for the last couple of weeks and still searching for a replacement.. We need I/O ports as well a relatively fast processor since we will use screen mirroring for some projects.. Andreas this is very interesting - we also need a video comparing things like RASPBERRY pi, ondroid, banana pi, orange pi and other to find a real replacement for our projects! Thank you Andreas for the great video!

Great information, thanks. I'd had one SD card wear out in my HA Pi3, and I was always worried it might corrupt if the power went out so with the Pi4 (to run an SSD) being unobtainium I looked into these mini PCs. My ThinkCentre for £55 has so far been perfect. I'm not really up to speed with all that Linux stuff so decided to try VirtualBox on the machine's clean Win10 install as I'm somewhat familiar with that. Simple to setup and restore my HA backup to the VM, and it runs great and gives me peace of mind. These little PCs are awesome.

This is perhaps the most bookmarkable youtube video for me right now. I'm in the process of re-purposing a Dell-Wyse Thin Client ($55 on Ebay) to run Proxmox, HA, etc. Upped RAM to 16GB (had a spare 8GB stick) and a larger SSD. I am stunned at how complete Proxmox is. What a great learning experience for an old guy like me. Whereas most YT videos have crap comments, yours always have insightful and informative ones (unlike this one).

Migrated to a HP ProDesk 600 G4 SFF (i7-8700) with 48GB. Running Arch with a windows VM, HA and other docker containers. Find it idles/averages around ~15w normally but will spike nearly 4x under load. Overall very happy with the performance/power tradeoff from a m93p/pi arrangement. Can also throttle CPU performance to cap power consumption spikes 'cpupower frequency-set -g powersave' etc

A single Raspberry Pi booting from SSD to USB is plenty fast for Home Assistant (it's what I use), but the ultimate win here is power savings and cost. I get that the Pi is unobtanium at this point, but a PC with VMs is usually going to burn more power, so the cost to run 24x7 is higher. But in this climate, you have to do what you have to do. Maybe one day we will be able to get some glorious SBCs again.

Thanks, as always, Andreas. I had been wondering at the use of these thin clients as a headless server for many reasons a while ago and seeing how locked down they seemed to be had dismissed them. Think I will have to revisit this. I have one main server that started out as a NAS/VM server and is slowly becoming used more for storing and presenting IoT data from the ever increasing number of devices around my house. So wanted to use a thin client as a server backup just for IoT as a backup server to avoid the single point of failure and to allow me to do maintenance and reboot the main server regularly, which is not easy at the mo. Concern about power consumption (esp at the moment) was another concern, as well as that we run our own DNS here, which I am currently using an old Pi as a secondary nameserver for. So lots to think about from your video. Thanks for the work you have put in on this, even if it now gives me yet another thing to think about!! Best wishes, Sarah

The timing of this video couldn’t have come any more perfectly. I just bought myself a fell optiplex for my HA! Just waiting on the power cord and I’ll be following along with your video a second time to get it up and running.

Ha Excellent Thanks for sharing your hardware home automation experiences . By the way, there are some excellent deals to be found on systems with AMD Epyc or Intel Xeon processors. Somewhat more costly in power usage but good fun to play around with.

I've been using these beasts for my K8s setup! Raspberry Pis are just not powerful enough. These little ITX M910Q Thinkcentre boxes are excellent.

I'm about to go down the same route. After problems with the cards I'm ready to put my HA on my proxmox. Thank you for this very informative video!

I agree. Every time a project does not specifically require GPIO, I run it under Proxmox on a mini PC. In my case a couple-year-old NUC. You can fit an amazing amount of LXC containers on a 32GB NUC. Because of the types of services I run, CPU is rarely an issue. I actually tend on run into more issues with USB contention.

I'm running Home Assistant on proxmox with a Seed Odyssey (Celeron J4105) and monitoring using a power monitoring smart plug. My old server was drawing 75W when I cut it back to just Home Assistant, and this one draws roughly 3.5W. There are plenty of new tiny form factor mini PCs available with that CPU or better in the £100-200 range, and you get a real M.2 Slot and/or SATA.

Thanks for the great breakdown and cost analysis. The raspberry pi shortages definitely require us all to become creative with our home project! A new alternative that I've also been looking at is the Celeron N5105 mini PCs. I've been seeing them pop up for around $180 USD which can also be competitive when comparing to an 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 with case and power.

Great video, thank you for it. My Lenovo M700 is in a way to me. Since beginning, I was not convinced to setup all my requirements on Pi, and this seems like a great solution.

Wow. The link to tteck is the greatest help.I have used Proxmox for many years and never found that github page. Thank you!

Another keeper ! Another video packed with information. Many youtubers would make 2-3 separate video with this content, to optimize their revenue. Not Andreas. Also, as usual Andeas goes one step further as most UKpostsrs. As a real engineer, analyzing all aspects, including computing long term power costs Love it ! /chrisV

There are all sorts of set-top boxes on the amlogic905x4 processor (arm a55 x4 + graphics ). In the 4/64 configuration you can find a new one in the range of $35. Judging by the video reviews armbian on them works quite well and it consumes about 10 watts in working mode.

Very good video. Started with Rpi3 many years ago for HA. After 2 microSD failures and tired of the long boot times I switched to running HA on Proxmox and it was wonderful. Middle of this year I switched to a much better machine running Proxmox as the Brick PC had limited resources and I needed to add more VMs. Iam currently doing a changeover of HA. I have my test setup running HA in the HA Blue hardware, with just HA running alone with the odd add-on. I then bought a micro-PC (HP 800 G3) with 16GB RAM, i5-6550T CPU, replaced the SSD with a bigger size and installed a NVMe SSD for boot and ISO storage. The micro-PC is running Proxmox and it will run all the extra apps to be used for HA. I currently have MQTT and Node-Red running in separate LXC for each. Soon will be adding MQTT2Zigbee. I want isolation and if HA has to be rebooted, MQTT and such are still available. Many way to do the setup that is best for one's purpose.

Thanks Andreas, s perfectly timed video! Been looking to merge a pair of pi4’s … excellent!

I did the same with refurbished notebooks. The display can be shut down via software, UPS is included (and in case of the big three manufacturers can be bought as spare parts for years!), plus it has decent loudspeakers and can give proper alerts, for example if something is out of normal with the cistern. It got me uptimes of two years instead of two weeks.

Yes - I like my ARM on microcontrollers or whatever this Xtensa thing is for esp32 :) -- Currently re-doing someone's ARM design from 10 years ago who was using dual ARM7 processors. Very good design technically but the obvious answer for many situations now is x86. Especially when size/power is not as much of a concern. There are endless suppliers of ARM boards which are time and money pits. BE AWARE!

I really appreciate your videos. You take your time and stay on point. Your English is very good. It has a good tempo and vocal control. I always learn valuable information from your videos, and implement them into my projects. Please continue your quality work. Thank you.

I got a Thinkcentre M600 because of the ridiculous price for the pi on the used market/new. I am currently configuring PiHole, Nextcloud and OpenMediaVault on it. So far the idle is around 7Watts and under load it goes to 11 or something. But what uses more power are my HDDs anyways, which I have in separate cases. All around I am very happy I got this, and not an RPi. Thanks for the bonus tip and the other insights in this video!

A good alternative for RPi is used Intel Compute sticks (especially the m3/m5 variants). They run fine from a 5V3A PSU and have quite a lot of performance.

Second hand laptop ftw. It's nearly free come with everything you need ( from windows to m&k) and have built in battery ( ZigBee tend to mess up after powercuts ). I think I wrote it in the last video among more tips but it didn't go through for some reason.

Quanto amo i tuoi video!!! Semplici, diretti e consistenti. Questo video arriva al momento giusto. Non sapevo come rimpiazzare i miei raspberry...

Got myself a free NUC from my employer a while ago and it's brilliant at being a Proxmox machine, added a 500GB SSD for storage and it's working like a charm. I run a lot of LXC containers, these are brilliant, however I am now trying to learn more about docker. LXC containers are definitely something to look at, I wouldn't run docker in them, however they can easily replace most Linux VM's and its very easy to deploy Turnkey Linux apps on them!

The issue with those tiny PCs is still power consumption. 15w for running continuously is going to cost a lot in electricity. I am running an Orange Pi Zero LTS at home as a "micro server", and it consumes about 0.8w, which is hard to beat. Perfectly capable to run Pi-hole DNS, a web server, a DLNA server, a file server etc. All my storage is online, so I don't need a lot of local storage.

I got my lenovo M92 tiny with a i3-2120T CPU running with debian a while ago but couldn't decide to make the move. Last Year, Inspired by your videos, I tried IOT-Stack but switched to plane docker-compose. I used my Setup with raspberry pis and X86 as well. It's really not that hard, to make it work on both platforms. The Lenovo is very versatile. Also, there are no cluttered cables and everything is nice and tidy. I was curious how the power consumption would be. Initially after installing Debian, It used about 18 watts in idle mode. Now comes the interesting part: i enabled various power saving methods like described in debians "SimplePowerSave" script. Later i made some experiments running powertop as a systemd unit. -----> It uses 8 Watts in idle mode now! I must admit, there are no services running by now, but it made a stunning 10W difference. You should try it out! But be aware: It powers down the usb in idle, to a point where even keyboards and mice power down if you adopt all recommendations from the links. I had to click the mouse or keyboard twice before it could be used again. This could be a problem to your conbee-stick. But i'm sure it's just some advanced configuration neccesary to make it work or you can exclude usb from power saving completely. I didn't fiddle with it any longer, since i will not move my Smart home setup to it by now. Maybe i will setup a full clone system and make a comparison. You should experiment with Debians "SimplePowerSave" Script. I tried to inderstand powertop quickly but variants of the "SimplePowerSave" Scripts will do the job, however you make them persistent. I mean: -----> It uses 8 Watts in idle mode now! --> How great is that??😀

Andreas, thanks for doing this video. With this step DIY home automation will move from the flying wire, bread board maker domain to a professional alternative. So greate!

Hi, thanks for this video, it works so smoothly. I bought a used PC, installed proxmox, created a VM with home assistant and within a few hours everything was working. Thanks 😊

Nice to see some more exposure to the TinyMiniMicro-Machines (ServeTheHome has a long running series about them). I switched my setup from one beefy old enterprise machine over to one dedicated HA box (Acer Veriton N4620G, 2nd gen i3... runs at ~7-9W and looks cool :D) and 3 Lenovo Tiny (2x i5 + 16GB [M73]. one as a sandbox mostly turned off, one for essentials like pihole and other stuff, but inside LXC instead of docker, 3rd one has a Pentium Gold and 8GB but was the bigger variant [m720q] which supports PCIe cards. Dropped my Quadro P400 in there and it runs 7 streams FullHD at only 19W using unlocked drivers and emby/jellyfin). The cool thing with multiple of those running as a proxmox cluster: I can do maintance (installing a smart-plug for example) without downtime, just migrate the container/VM to another host, shutdown the first and reverse afterwards. Current Consumption: - PvE 1: ~12-14W - PvE 2: (sandbox) off, aka 0W else same ~12-14W - PvE 3: (media server): ~16W - HA (Acer i3): 8W One thing to note for people running Lenovo Tiny machines: Turn off "Smart Power On" and everything in there except Wake-On-LAN, else your machine won't stay off when shutting down via proxmox and instead do an instant boot afterwards. With those settings turned off I can finally get my 2nd machine to stay off and wake it up via proxmox if I want to tinker around. Oh and another thing: There's cheap (~20,-) adapters which can take 2x m.2 SSDs inside a regular 2.5" SATA enclosure. With that you can run something like a mirror-setup of fast storage inside a VM beside your normal boot/proxmox SSD already in there and safer then using a normal 2.5" drive.

When it comes to core assignments, it's important to note that a given VM must have exclusive access to the assigned number of cores/threads *simultaneously* at a given moment in time, and also to remember that the hypervisor sometimes needs time to do stuff as well. This means that if a particular VM is assigned all or most of the cores available on a host, that VM will basically run solo and any computation by other VMs will require pausing the VM in question and switching it out for another one. This can actually result in _lower_ performance in practice because of the switching overhead. Every time the VM makes an I/O request, the whole VM has to be paused and let the hypervisor run for a bit to service that request; very inefficient! It's difficult with small core count processors like this, but whenever possible I target half-or-less of the available cores (or logical threads if not) to make sure the hypervisor can efficiently schedule multiple VMs to actually execute in true parallel. If you have 4 cores with hyperthreading, this means you have a maximum of 8 threads to work with. You can have 8 tasks "in flight" at once, but remember that hyperthreading isn't magic and you'll still take a (smaller) performance hit if you have multiple threads doing computation on one physical core too. As such, it's sometimes better to ignore hyperthreading and just do your numbers based on actual cores, but with processors this small that's often not practical. You could assign your VMs to 4 virtual cores each so they could run beside each other, but the hypervisor will occasionally switch one out to do its own processing. Even better is to assign 2-3 cores per VM if the VMs are not especially heavyweight (probably true in this case) so that you can have multiple VMs running in true parallel while still having a core/thread or two free for the hypervisor to handle stuff like I/O and networking calls. People often assign more cores than necessary to a given VM, and the people specifying requirements for a virtual machine are guilty of perpetuating this because their thinking is "more cores for my application, which is obviously the most important, is better!". In practice, many workloads can't meaningfully take advantage of more than a couple cores simultaneously, and you only need to up the core count if you see the VM is actually hitting 100% utilization for all of its assigned virtual cores.

I am currently working on replacing my Raspberry with such a PC for ioBroker and co. Great that you made the video.

Super video! helped me a lot! Because of it bought a mini PC (Dreamquest pro), installed Proxmox and moved my home assistant from RPI4 to the mini PC. All directions in video were spot on (except small change in qm disk import command).

It's a shame that Raspberry Pi have completely abandoned the maker community that they built their company off. 400k pi's still being built per month but all going to "commercial partners". You'd think Pi Trading was going to float on the stock market.....

raspberry pis are gimmicks.. they were interesting for a short period of time, but people always wanted to use them as desktop computers, so the specs kept going higher and higher, to the point where they need heatsinks with fans and they're more expensive than a cheap mini itx or micro atx solution. If they could get the prices back down to sane levels and keep them in stock, they might be worth it, but until then, they're gimmicks.

Danke! Ich habe wirklich überlegt, was nun die alternative ist. Mit diesem Tip hast du mir sehr geholfen!

Very usefull and interesting with a remarkable outcome and specs regarding the thin clients. I want one !

I switched my HA setup to a wyse thin client about a year ago was so impressed bought a 2nd one replaced my octoprint pi too. They are now my go to when a small device needed without gpio

Had this same issue earlier this year with helping someone. I couldn't bring myself to using a slow Pi for them. USFF x86 refurbs are definitely the way. Welcome to the club!

I just decided to switch from OpenHab to Home Assistant. I guess I’ll build a little with the Rapsberry Pi 4 that I have and then remember this video when I need to expand and improve. Thank you for the timely video!!!

I love how I still understood exactly what you meant when you said you will always "sit in the first row" (it's "have a front row seat"), it's close enough! 😄

Yeah, I couldn't get a Pi when I wanted to get into Home Assistant, so it's running on some spare parts I had lying around. An old PC case, Pentium Anniversary and 8GB of memory. It's a decent option, as low end "junk" PCs will run as fast or faster than a Pi. I may need to fiddle with the available power saving options to get my power draw that low, but it's barely idling most of the time.

The Lenovo ThinkCentre M73 Tiny and M93 Tiny (USFF) have been my go-to computers for a couple of years now. I have several RPi 3's lying around, but they just don't cut it for me any more. I pretty much just throw Ubuntu server on a Lenovo and use it as a headless server. Hadn't thought about using one as a VM host. Thank you for this intro to ProxMox.

I love the versatility and efficiency of the Pi and "thin workstations" but I already have a proxmox server due to an application requiring Windows, not possible on Pi or think workstations due to lack of sata expandability. I imagine many others are in the same situation thus a "larger" system supporting all requirements for various VMs appears to be the most efficient solution. Thanks for the content

Great stuff mate, really appreciated. I have always been Banana/Orange/Raspberry Pi, but as much as I want to go with Atom processors, DDR4L and SSD's going forward, running the SoC's off POE is just too perfect, especially remote hard resets if things go haywire. Either way it's just all Portainer though; have not found need for any Type 1 virtualisation yet! Cheers

Nice video. I got the Fujitsu S920 running continuous for more than 6 months. It's nice machine. I have installed the Zigbee2Mqtt with the ZigBee dongle, SATA PCIE card with 2 SSDs running my shared folders across the network devices. I have installed NodeRed, grafana, InfluxDB, MQTT, and lots of programs. By the way, the Fujitsu S920 got an option for POE also. It might be handy !! Thank you so much for your inspiring videos. I will buy the other machines that you mentioned and I will do the same as you did.

I've been using a Lenovo like that for a couple of years. It just works

I ran HA on a Raspberry years ago. Then I bought NUC running Kodi and HA under Ubuntu, but it was hard to backup all my projects, and if I screw up one thing, all was broken. So I installed Debian with Proxmox on top of it on my NUC last year. (because I needed Kodi/HDMI). Now I have separate turnkey lxc container for each project and HA as VM. All containers (adguard, docker, Haas,... ) are backed up to the NAS every night 😎

Nice review, liked it. I myself jumped from pi1 or 2 to atomic pi and it has worked for me for years now. It has it's advantages, I have HA, mosquito and few additional services wrapped in docker-compose scripts, all works nicely. The only thing i kind of did not appreciate in Your review was that You showed how to disable proxmox "nagging" screen, yet asked to support your channel right after that.

Great timing! I just decided yesterday that one holiday project will be to build a Proxmox server on some old hw and migrate my HA (currently on Docker).

Thanks for the video. We use a bunch of these for work as lightweight Windows 10 desktops. I hadn't thought about running Linux much less Docker and Procmox on them before.

I’ve been working with thin clients for several years, specifically HP t series. It’s really important that you use a write filter to limit disk usage once the system has been setup because the the disk IO counts before failure are limited. You can make exceptions to critical storage areas. At the same time employing write filter will allow these things to have really long lifespans as there is limited wear on the components.

Thanks for great video and chapters about power consumption. I recently purchased Odroid H3 as an alternative to my RPi4 (home-server). It is like full PC. It has x86 Intel and it can run under 2W in idle! I measured 1.2-1.8 W power consumption (only device, without power supply). It runs on 12V and I have connected 1x 16GB DDR4 RAM and 1x 256GB m.2 SSD (Adata XPG SX6000 Pro). OS: Debian 11 with kernel 5.19.0 and applied tweaks via powertop utility.

Thank You for this interesting, accurate and also very informative video with your pleasant accent.

Considering you have my age and background I again am amazed by your weekly achievements! Even in Linux and alike. Great job! Grüzi from Holland :)

Thank you for this contribution! I use ThinClients for a long time as Smart TV's (long before you get them in a store) and using the used ThinClients also give them a second live. PROXMOX-this is the real game changer for the 'home-cloud'-For years I run a full-stack Server, Dell I7 32GB 2TB, with PROXMOX. Several Container ( PiHole, Domotics, NotRed, Minetest, Web-Development-Enviroment and one VM running jellyfin media centre, feeding our 4 TV's!

I appreciate that you made this presentation. I recently had to diversify as RPi are too expensive and or unavailable. I bought a libre PC Le potato but it is not compatible with RPi3b enclosures. I had to use dremel to cut the enclosure so it would work. I looked at many thin clients on eBay. There are lots of Dell Wyze and Fujitsu available. I received a donation of two older NUCs so I am using those. Thanks for your works. 😊

I bought a $109 amd mini pc and installed Ubuntu. I used Qemu/KVM and VirtManager to install and run Home Assistant. Much less painful and it runs great.

Good decision Andreas! mysellf I have replaced since 11 months 2 raspberries PI and an old PC by a 2nd Hand Lenovo tiny PC running a free ESXI hypervisor from VMWARE. Rock solid, no more SD cards burned, full control on RAM, Disk, and availability of snapshots. (runs HA, VITAL PBX, apache server and some other) - my choice of ESXI was because we use it in the office.

Nice to see you made the jump. If power consumption is very important then NUCs have an advantage compared to USFFs. You can also lower the TDP so that the CPUs dont Turbo. Also if you go with Proxmox its better to get the tall NUCs as they take 2 drives (m.2 +2.5 inch).

Finally... I have been proved to be ahead of the curve!!!! I am using a DELL FX160 ... it was originally sold by dell as a thin client, but i put an SSD in it and installed debian no problem... I have been using for HA for 2+ years now... it works really well.

Awsome video glad the thin clients worked out. I've just purchased the fijitsu for a pfsense router to replace a pc, I do have my proxmox on a xeon e3 1220l with ha but would like eventually re do that.

I also replaced all but one Pi that i had running with Fujitsu Futro S740 Thinclients. Depending on RAM/SSD/Accessories I bought them for 30-40€ each. All of them including a case, some without a psu, as I am using them with a 12V 2A PoE Splitter (which works fine, as the mainboard has a wide input range, even when fujitsu specifies it for their standard 19v supply). Power usage (running proxmox, even the 4gb one) is between 4 and 10W. One is used as a central gateway for zigbee/zwave/bluetooth and mounted in the attic, the other one is responsible for homeassistant exclusively, but I am still using proxmox for easy management and snapshots. In the same go I also replaced my two Fujitsu TX1320 M3 SFF Servers with a single Lenovo M90q with a i5 10500T, which is faster then both of them together, while only using 30W with all my homelab stuff running. The only Pi left is attached to a waveshare touchscreen as a smarthome wall panel, also supplied by poe (using a waveshare poe shield with additional 12v out), as I need some IO pins there.

Fantastic! Great video - good explanation - very informative!

I'm also running my HomeAssistant on a brand new HP EliteDesk 800 G3 DM with an i5-6500, 16GB ram I bought in Ricardo (stock clearance sale). I found the Raspberry Pi 4 for Influx/Grafana on the lower edge to run on. With the Elite Desk it’s perfect and power consumption goes down to is 6.5-7W which is excellent. There is an easier way to bring the HomeAssistant on the internal disk without removing it or the need for an adaptor. I use the Ventoy boot solution to stage almost any PC/server with any OS. I have a SATA disk with USB adapter, installed Ventoy on it and stored all the images I need on the disk. For HomeAssistant you just boot a live linux, download Etcher and flash the internal drive - done. If you need more sophisticated disk tools, Hiren’s BootCD is your friend. Always great to see your videos!

@Mr. Spiess: In Proxmox, I overbook the CPUs. This means, I assign max. number of CPUs per VM where needed (If you run a windows variant which uses limited CPU cores, there is no benefits using more cores). But I do not overbook RAM. It is possible with the balloon-driver, but it might cause swapping to HDD/SSD so there will be performance penalty. Overbooking CPU might cause penalty, this is where you should keep an eye on the CPU usage of the system. But most of the time, CPUs are idle (this is where the concept of virtualization saves energy by consolidation). For your setup, you can use up all available CPUs for each VM and divide the memory (minus 1 GB for Proxmox) equally over the VMs. I have had better performance with "Default (kvm64)" CPU type than with any other CPU types on Linux based VMs. BR

Excellent I tried this method on my HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini PC (Intel Core i5 6th gen, 8 GB DDR4 RAM, 256 GB SSD & it works fine. Thank you.✌✌

Thanks, excellent video, I use Orange PI 4, now with the new 5 release comes with up to 16GB RAM and only cost around USD $110

i also use proxmox for some time. You can use an LXC container (e.g. ubuntu22.04) to reduce memory usage (as some parts of the proxmox are re-used instead of simulating the whole kernel as VMs do). I can also recommend the proxmox backup server - since I have this running, I am a lot more comfortable with updates - if they break the system, I can always restore a previous version! - and it works!!

I'm glad this video has received 80K plus views. Good for you Andreas!

I actually built that same computer last year for a media center in the living room. Those M93 tinys are awesome !

I have just got one of the new mini-PCs with the Intel N100 CPU. Passmark score is as high as the fastest CPU in your chart, and yet the TDP is just 6w. I've been incredibly impressed with it. Apparently it's based on the e-cores from the Adlerlake CPUs. Well worth a look.

The default proxmox CPU governor is "performance". I saved precious watts setting this to "ondemand" without noticeable performance loss. You can also disable a lot of the cluster related services and run a program like powertop to shave off watts.

Good night. I have been tormented for several years with several servers on raspberries. First, a bunch of services on one or two raspberries. Several times I broke some services while updating others. Then I figured out Docker on a raspberry, and life became easier, but problems with a bunch of wires, a bunch of usb drives, additional fans, and bad contacts finished me off. Among other things, it lay on the shelf in the form of a ball of wires and caused fear and horror among relatives. As a result, I assembled a small computer on AMD Ryzen 3700, and installed a hypervisor on it, just like you. A couple of years have passed since then. The server has been overgrown with a Raid controller, an additional network card and a bunch of disks, but it still works stably and does not scare people with its appearance. And of course, it is much faster than a pack of raspberries ... I'll leave them for other projects ...

Really liked it. I went for a Cloud solution. But I am tempted to buy a cheap server. Proxmox is almost an overkill. Docker is good enough for almost any Stack. Runs on any minimal Linux, slight preference for 8086 but really most runs on Arm.

these thin client PCs are overwhelmingly superior vs the RPi in these dedicated server use cases - convenience (form factor, integrated power supply, cooling) and SSD connectivity - and very affordable pricing - they all combine to carapult these PCs way ahead of RPis - and even the power consumption is only marginally higher. Looks loke RPi really only has a valid role for when it needs to be integrated into something else, and/or mobility - situations where will be powering off of batteries excellent video that shows a great, highly pragmatic way to grapple with the irratating supply chain headache

I was so tired of waiting for a pie just to try home-assistent. Last week finally decided to get a cheap NUC. My Home assistant is small as I m still finding out stuff. The NUC runs very silent, very cool and only uses less than 5W.