Building a Low Energy Virtualization Server for Your Office/Homelab with Proxmox

hello again everyone and welcome back to my channel I've just finished building a brand new virtualization server it's this guy right here it's running proxmox and it runs at just 50 watts on average which is crazy and that was the goal I wanted to build a low power virtualization host and I've definitely accomplished that in this video I'm going to talk about the parts that I decided to go with I'll show the build process and then you'll see it in action [Music] all right so before we get started I wanted to give you guys some information regarding the motherboard that I decided to go with for this build and here it is right here this is the model number I'm not going to read off that entire model number but there will be a link to this page below in the description and there's also going to be links to other components down there as well but the most important takeaway here is that this is rated to run at up to 55 watts and the CPU is built-in so basically when you don't count the RAM and the hard drives or peripherals that you'll likely add to something like this it's actually a very low rating for power usage and the CPU that's built in is this one right here it's an AMD epic 32 51 and that has eight cores and sixteen threads so I think that can more than handle the VMS that I plan on running on this server and it is replacing a dell poweredge r6 10 and the cpu that's currently in there is this one right here the Intel Xeon l56 30 and a link to this page will also be down below as well and you can see some information regarding this processor it actually has fewer cores and fewer threads however the current server does have two of these so when it comes to the number of threads it does equal out to be the same but I did also pull up a comparison page right here so we can compare the two side-by-side on the Left we have the AMD epic processor that's the new one again and then on the right we have the current server that it's replacing and we can see that it's actually going to be well it's probably going to be a lot faster because look at the numbers here the AMD epic 32 51 does appear to be orders of magnitude better than the l56 30 and that's amazing to me because I was thinking with the low power usage I mean keep in mind that yes it does appear to have a higher power you rating here but the overall motherboard in its entirety is rated up to 55 watts which is still going to beat this guy I was expecting that this was actually going to be somewhat of a downgrade and I was okay with that because I have never been at a point where I really maxed out even this so I think maybe this is also overkill for me as well because I mean I'm mainly the only person that uses the server rack anyway so I think that this is actually going to be faster when I was actually expecting it to be well like I said a little bit of a downgrade the clock speed is higher the turbo speed is higher the number of physical cores is higher but again when you've added up all the threads it'll equal out to the same and then you also have a single thread rating of 1440 versus 935 and the CPU mark is more than double that's actually really awesome so I'm itching to get this thing built so let's go ahead and do that I'm going to switch the camera I'll get everything ready I'll show you all the components that are going to go inside this new server and then we'll go ahead and build it okay so let's go ahead and take a look at all of the parts that are going to go into this new server build I can't wait to put this together now first of all obviously we need a chassis a case we need something to put the parts in and for that I have this I start USA d2 14 case and I'll try to get it in frame here so you guys can see it better now this one is very very basic as you can see it's not the most beautiful thing you've ever seen but I think it'll get the job done and in the back we have two little thumb screws here now with the top cover removed you can clearly see that it is definitely a generic case but I think for this project this is all I need I'll put this aside for now so I'm gonna show you guys the motherboard in just a moment but I'll get the smaller items out of the way first and right here I have two sticks of RAM by crucial ddr4 each one is 32 gigs so this will give me obviously a total of 64 and I actually ordered four of these but only two of them have arrived so far Amazon's just slow to ship things nowadays for some reason I can't really understand but I think 64 gigs is more than enough to get me started so when it comes to storage I have these two SSDs right here both by samsung there are 512 gigabytes which should be more than enough storage for my needs I decided to reuse these from the old build because I wanted to use the extra money for you know memory which I kind of feel like is way more important for this kind of use case and if you're curious of the model number these drives are both the 850 Pro so I think I'll have more than enough storage an SSD back storage will definitely make this a very fast server and for the power supply I decided to go with this unit right here just like my earlier FreeNAS build this is from Antec it's the exact same power supply 380 watts but 88% max efficiency is an 80 plus bronze power supply I mean it's not modular so I know it could be better but I think it's going to be just fine for what I need it's definitely running very well in my free now server which I built in a previous video so I decided to go with this same one in this build as well for the motherboard I've decided to again go with Super Micro just like I did with the freeness build in my earlier video this one though is a little bit more expensive than that one because I wanted to have more cores and more CPU horsepower because again this is a virtualization server I'm definitely going to need the extra power boost you'll see the model number of this board on the screen and the CPU is actually built in it's an AMD epic 32 51 8 core CPU and it has 16 threads and I think that'll work just fine for me because I don't have a ton of virtual machines and this is actually a pretty powerful board and this motherboard is rated to run up to about 55 watts so the power usage is definitely going to be lower than the model that it's replacing in fact let's go ahead and get it on box let's see what's inside so we have a packing list and I'll put that aside and right here we basically get some information about the board layout so I know where to put the pins and everything basically exactly what you would expect to find in a super mikro box IO shield we have a plethora of cables here so I think I'll definitely have enough for what I need what goes inside let's check out the actual motherboard yes it is a little small this is a mini ITX motherboard and here it is in all of its glory check this thing out there's no fan on here there is a model that does include a fan but I wanted one that was quiet I don't really want my server rack to be very loud so that was a very important factor for me but this is the board that I'll be putting in the case in fact let's go ahead and do that right now so next I'm going to need to inspect the i/o board and punch out each of the metal covers for all of the ports that I'll end up using and it's important not to punch them all out because it appears that they're using a uniform IO board for multiple different motherboards so if you punch them all out you're going to let unnecessary air into the case so only punch out the ones you actually need I'll go ahead and take care of that right now and here's the i/o board right here with everything punched out so I'll go ahead and put it in the case just like so and I'll get these wires on the way definitely need these later and let's take another look at the motherboard before I put it in the case here it is again and I want to show you guys the ports that are on the back as you can see we have multiple Ethernet ports here VGA USB 3 basically exactly what you would expect from a server motherboard and the standoffs I need are already on the case itself so I don't need to do anything there I should be able to just go ahead and put it in the case make sure it's lined up and it is and there we go and next I'll use my patented screwdriver to go ahead and tighten the board down onto the case next I'm going to go ahead and install the RAM and since I only have two modules right now I need to put these in slots a 2 and B 2 okay so far so good we have these cables right here that need to be installed this is obviously USB that's what it says in the cable I'll worry about cable management later but I want to get these plugged in of course we have our front panel connectors right here so let's go ahead and get these installed so all of the cables are connected at least in terms of the front panel connectors I still need to add a fan and then also install a power supply so for the fan I have this cheap fan from Best Buy right here I forgot to show you at the beginning but it's about five dollars it's a very quiet fan I think it'll do the job just nicely so I'll go ahead and get that installed okay should be able to access this little fan overlay whatever you want to call it here the front of the case four more screws definitely not the most modular case I've ever used so I've installed the fan onto this plate and I'm simply going to put it back into the case you alright so now I'm going to go ahead and install the power supply so here's the power supply right here this is what's going in the case I've gone ahead and unboxed it there's nothing really amazing about this you'll notice that there's no fan on either side the fan is right here there's really not much room for a fan in this case there is a fan vent though so you can put a power supply in this case that has a fan you just can't set anything on top of it now on my end I probably will want to stack something on top of it so I bought this power supply and again there's no fan so I won't need to worry about anything being blocked anyway I'll go ahead and fit it into the case okay so let's go ahead and attach the cables and we should be pretty close to done you okay so for the most part everything is done I obviously have to do a little bit more work with the cable management because well it's a complete disaster but with this case and a non modular power supply there's only so much I can do okay so I almost forgot guys something very important this motherboard cable right here is obviously necessary initially I thought that it wasn't because there's nothing on the motherboard anywhere that matches up to this cable so I was thinking because it's low power maybe it doesn't need it well it definitely does it uses this little attachment right here that comes with the motherboard so essentially all we do is just attach these two cables together make sure they're nice and snug and then this little cable right here actually plugs into the motherboard and it goes right here now if I can get that in the frame I'm going to try but there's this little tiny little connector right here in front of my finger you barely see it slow that one right there and I'm going to carefully just plug this in and there you go now I'm going to fix the cable management year I know it's a disaster but I'll take care of that off-camera but basically everything is all set we're ready to power on this server for now let's go ahead and just put the side panel back on and I'm going to power this thing on and see if it's actually working all right so the server has been racked and it's ready to go I've already powered it on and what I'm going to do right now is connect to the IPMI interface so we can go ahead and set up proxmox so let's get started by DHCP server registers all the host names in DNS so I should be able to hit the IP mi interface by typing in the host name that I gave it in my PSN server and that is VM - host - 1 - I PMI dot home network dot IO let's see if this works and I have a login screen here so so far so good actually off-camera I've gone ahead and configured the IP mi interface already I've changed the username and the password and the username actually defaults to admin and all caps and that's also the same with the password as well that should also be admin in all caps but not in my case before I even customize the username and the password it actually defaulted to a completely different password there is a sticker on the motherboard that actually had the password written on it so just keep that in mind if you buy this motherboard you should look at the motherboard if you have a sticker like I did it'll have the password on there and that's the password you'll need to use but I've gone ahead and customized this I've actually called my user philosoraptor why well because they can open doors why not and then the password I'll type that in and here we are on the IP mi interface and this is really cool because it actually allows me to remotely manage the server without even having to get out of the chair in fact I don't even need to plug in a flash drive to install proxmox if I go to virtual media and then cd-rom image you'll see that I actually have an ISO image mounted and this is the server right here that the ISO image is stored on this is the very same FreeNAS server that I set up in my previous video and then this is the path to the share and the ISO right here so basically what I've done is I've saved the proxmox ISO image I've shortened the name to just PvE ISO I've stored it in my images here on this server and then I mounted it off-camera in this interface right here I just wanted to make sure that it's working and what that allows me to do is go to remote control and then I can go to the I KVM right here and then on this screen I'll click on this i kb m html5 button and that should give me and it does a look at what's on the screen on the server right now under options I can configure the zoom so I can go to full screen mode for example which doesn't seem to help me all that much does it but I go to preference then I can actually increase the scaling let's just do maybe about 70 percent and I'll make that a bit larger here and you can see right here that I'm on the boot screen it's asking me to select a boot device so off-camera I basically pressed f11 through the virtual console to make sure that it opened the boot menu and then down here the third option is a virtual cd-rom drive and that's actually the cd-rom drive or the virtual cd-rom drive that has that ISO image attached so all I should need to do is press ENTER and it should boot right from that ISO image and here we have the proxmox boot screen and maybe I need to lower the zoom a bit here it's actually quite large a press ENTER to installed proxmox and this will be the same as if I was actually standing in front of the server with a keyboard you now is starting up so at this point in the installer we have the end-user License Agreement that I'm going to skip down here and degree two so hopefully I'm not signing my life away or anything like that now I do notice an issue with the iocai VM sometimes where the mouse doesn't work as it's not working now and when that happens I can lower the zoom level here so let me try that I'll go down to let's say 60% and sure enough that seems to have fixed it although it's really hard to see then here on the second screen of the Installer it's going to ask us which harddrive we would like to install proxmox on and if you recall I have two there both Samsung SSDs in my case I'm only going to install proxmox on the very first SSD now we do have other options though if I click options just to show you what we have available and if I drop down here we actually have ZFS options as well if you want to do a raid ZFS is the supported method but I'm not going to do that I'm going to do ext4 on a single Drive I can always make the second Samsung SSD maybe alternate storage or something like that and then the obvious question is well why am I not using ZFS there is a ZFS equivalent to raid one why not use that and the answer is well ZFS isn't always a good option and it's not a good option in my case you really need good hard drives for ZFS otherwise you're going to have trouble and I learned this the hard way on the previous server the one that this is replacing and it's not that samsung SSDs are bad although some people in home lab really don't like them for some reason they're really not up to the task when it comes to something like ZFS it could have something to do with the cache I'm not really sure but what will happen is is that you'll get all kinds of errors on the drives if you try to use ZFS on these hard drives so it's better that you don't use that option unless you have maybe something like enterprise hard drives that are up to the task again samsung SSDs are great but these particular SSDs in my experience don't work well with the CFS so I'll just go with a single drive for now I definitely do prefer at least raid 1 for redundancy but I do have backups of backups of backups I'm not really too worried about losing anything so I'll just install it on the first SSD for now and then I'll figure out what to do with the other SSD later so I'll click Next and then we go ahead and configure the timezone which I'll do right now set it to Detroit because that's the closest point to me and then next so now it's asking me to set a password for the root user and I'm just setting it to something simple for now I'll go ahead and change it later and I'll put in my email address here and I do pay for support with proxmox so I definitely want to put in a real email address here so at this screen we have the configuration for networking so that's what I'll set up here and it auto selected the first Network interface you know there's four of them here on this server board and it's pre-populated the IP address which can be correct appending now in my case it actually is because this is the IP address right here that I've designated for this proxmox server and the reason why it knows this is because my pfsense device actually has a static reservation for this interface already that I've gone ahead and added to that server and it's actually just defaulting to DHCP right now so these are the values that it picked up from DHCP and actually they're all correct except for this one here I'm going to change this this is supposed to be the same as the Gateway in my case so basically you just make sure that these values match whatever is for your network environment and these are the values for mine so I'll go ahead and click Next and it gives me a little summary here so I'll click install and then go ahead and let it finish and here we are with a successful installation so let's go ahead and reboot and then I'll log into the new installation and get it set up the rest of the way so this is awesome here we are we have the server all started and ready to go so I shouldn't need this anymore and now what I can do is open a new tab and I can type in the IP address of the new server but actually what I'm going to do is type in the host name of the server in my case because pfSense is awesome but in your case you could just use the IP address or the DNS name whatever you use on your network so in my case it's all I need to do is just type in the URL there so I don't have SSL or TLS or anything set up yet so I'll just accept the risk and continue you can always set that up later and then here we have the login screen so go ahead and log in and it's going to warn me that I don't have a valid subscription so I actually do have a subscription key that I will add to the server but for right now I'm just going to click OK and in a new tab I'm going to open the other proxmox server I'll log into this one as well so now I have both VM servers opened in their own tab so this right here is the new one that we just setup and then here's BM host 2 which is the other are 610 that I have it has all of my VMs on it right now and I need to get all of these moved over here to this new server but before I do that I need to join the cluster and there's a few things I need to do even before that now first of all let's check some of the resources here so here on summary we can see that zero percent effectively of 16 CPUs are in use we get the load average we can see that the amount of memory that I have is appropriate and then if I expand this and go to the local LVM you can see that I have quite a bit of space left here which is awesome then over here on the second note if I do the same thing and then go to summary it's not all that different so here we can see that we have about the same we have 16 CPUs there are 2 8 core processors on this power edge are 6 10 we have about the same amount of RAM and the CPU we have here is the l56 30 like I mentioned earlier in the video now on the first server I made a mistake I forgot to name the server and I'm going to go ahead and rename it now you don't want to do this if you are already in a cluster but since I haven't joined it yet I can go ahead and fix the name so to do that I'm going to access the shell right here which will log me right into a terminal then what I could do is Nano / etsy slash host name then enter so if you're curious how to rename a node well this is how you do it so I'll give it the appropriate name the name I should have gave it to begin with I have my own naming scheme here for the server so VM host 1 this is going to be the primary server so ctrl o and then enter to save the file and then ctrl X to exit out and there's one more file I need to edit it's Etsy hosts so I'll do that now and here we have the actual incorrect host name I'll just go ahead and fix it and then again at the end here looks correct to me so I'll save the file and then I'll go ahead and reboot the server I'll give it a moment to come back up and then see if the name has changed appropriately and something cool about ipmi I mean I could just go here to the remote control and actually see what the current boot progress is so I don't have to guess so I just caught the end of the boot screen there and now it should be starting up and there it is should be ready pretty quick there we go we have the correct host name here so should be able to refresh the page and there we go we have the correct name so I've gone ahead and fixed that now the next thing I need to do is make sure that both servers are fully updated so on VM host 2 I'll start with that one because you want them to have all the latest updates when you join the cluster so I'll refresh and there's no updates available on the second node there's definitely going to be updates available on this node but before I do that I'm actually going to need to apply my license key to make sure that I get all of the updates so off-camera I have copied my license keys so I'll go down here to subscription and then it says not found I'll have it added it yet so I'll upload the key paste it in right here and click OK and it says that it's active so I should be able to go here to updates and actually get updates and let's see if it works so I'll refresh it probably won't and sure enough it didn't because it does take several minutes for the license to fully activate after you add it so this is actually normal it happens every single time generally it seems like I have to wait about five minutes before this starts working so I'll wait a few more minutes and even though the license hasn't been fully applied it already is showing updates here you do get updates even without a subscription key there's just a few more additional things and more updates that you get with the subscription key so I want to make sure that I'm getting everything so basically what I do is I just keep clicking refresh over and over again until it works enough time hasn't passed yet as we can see here I'm still erroring out so I'll give it another moment and then I'll try it again it looks like this time is actually working so that's cool so it didn't air this time so I should be able to go ahead and click on upgrade and then enter it's going to go ahead and install everything and update everything so I'll go ahead and let this finish okay so that's done and I'm going to need to reboot for those updates to take effect but actually there's something I should do first and I'll scroll back up here to network and we have just this one bridge adapter right here this is the default one that you get when you set up proxmox but if I go to the second node and then go to network you'll see that I actually have two bridges set up here because I have one for the management interface and the other for the VMS and when I join the cluster I want all of the networking to match otherwise I'll have problems so I need to add the second bridge to the first node so for that I'll click create I'll create a Linux bridge and the name will default to VM BR and then whatever the number of the other bridge interface was plus 1 so VM br1 in my case for the second bridge for the IP Sider I'm going to give a 10 10 10 0/24 and the bridgeport I'm going to give it the second port right here so e no.2 should be good to go I'm not going to give it a gateway because we already have a gateway on the first interface so I'll click create and down here it gives me a list of changes it's going to make this also needs a reboot which is why I didn't reboot right after the updates but now that I have the bridge set up I can go ahead and do that so a click reboot yes and then I'll let it go all right we're ready to go refresh just to make sure and on the network tab here we do have that other network interface everything has been applied successfully so now the only thing left to do is to join the cluster now to do that I'm going to go here to VM host two because that's already on the cluster click up here and then go to cluster I'll click join information and then copy and then I'll go over here to the brand-new node and do the same thing go to the same place cluster and then I'll simply paste right here click join and it's often the case that I'll get no output here I'm not sure if it's a bug that doesn't mean that the process isn't working but I usually can click over here on the other node and sometimes I'll see it down here in the messages and sure enough here it is it says ok even though I didn't get a status here I see the status right here did actually update successfully so we should have both notes and we do now BM host one is shown along with VM host - even though I'm on the VM host 2 page and then here on the first one I should be able to refresh log in again and sure enough we actually see both nodes here as well I see all of the VMs running on the second node that I need to move up here to the first node and you know what let's go ahead and give that a shot and see if it works so I'm going to right click this one right here and I'll migrate it VM host one is the target so migrate again let's see if it works containers do need to be shut down to migrate that's normal so so far so good so go ahead and migrate this one as well and it's completed successfully and we have both of these two nodes right here moved over to the first host and then I can right click now that I know that it's working and migrate them all with bulk migrate and let's just do let's just say three at a time and then migrate let's see what happens all right so everything has been moved all of my VMs are now running on the first node so let's check out the resources now and even with all of these VMs running it's not really using much of the cpu honestly none of these servers are really running any jobs at this time of the day but we still have plenty of RAM free and plenty of CPU free so I'm going to figure out what to do with this second node I might decommission it I might not even need it anymore or I might actually replace it with a similar build but either way this project was a complete success so there you go that was the build process for my new proxmox server I hope you enjoyed it I hope it was helpful for you guys and again it runs at about 50 watts on average which is awesome for a virtualization host I definitely think that this project was successful one thing I do want to mention though is that sense the footage was recorded where I built it I've decided to go a different direction with the hard drive so in the show notes below I'm going to have the different model that I decided to go with I don't know what it was I tried to use the same SSDs that were in the previous hosts the one that this replaces but I was having some errors and I'm not really sure if it's a firmware incompatibility or if the drives were just defective but I did have to replace that I decided to go with an nvme drive but other than that this server right here this is the one that I built the hard drive was the only thing that I changed it's low power it's fast it's awesome so I hope that was helpful again if you guys have any questions let me know in the comments below and if you've built your own home lab server let me know in the comments below what you decided to go with what your infrastructure looks like let's start a conversation about home lab and then I'll see you soon in the next video I have exciting content coming real real soon so make sure you subscribe if you haven't done so already and I'll see you in the next video you

Channel: LearnLinuxTV

Views: 255,535

Keywords: LearnLinux, Linux, Tutorial, Review, Howto, Guide, Distribution, Distro, Learn Linux, operating system, os, gnu/linux, proxmox, virtualization, low-energy, low energy, energy, efficient, low power, power, home server, homelab, home lab, server build, custom server, kvm, qemu, cluster, virtual machine, virtual server, virtualization server, home network, virtual server hosting, home network setup, home server hosting, home server room, home server setup

Id: 0cN-bFZMysE

Length: 38min 12sec (2292 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 09 2020