Perfect 1L Homelab in 3 Upgrade Tiers Project TinyMiniMicro

let's transform this one liter PC we bought cheap off of eBay into a killer low power home lab or SMB server by the time we're done we're gonna have plenty of cores 96 gigabytes of memory 8 terabytes of nvme storage this thing's even gonna have 10 gigabit Ethernet even with all that this thing is going to spend most of its days virtually silent just sipping power yeah let's get to it hey guys this is Patrick from sth and this is an HP Elite 600 G9 you may have seen our review as part of our tiny mini micro series where you look at the 1 liter PCS from Lenovo HP and Dell and we review them as they could be both desktops but also home lab notes what we haven't done recently is we have not shown folks what you can do with these things if you want to turn them into an awesome home lab mode so I thought well why don't we do that with this so this video we have four terabyte ssds we have 48 gigabyte sodims yes they are a thing we also have 10 gig and two and a half gig ethernet adapters I'm going to show you how to do all of this and turn this little system into something that is completely awesome and I just want to say thank you real quick to the sth YouTube members who made making something like this possible by supporting sth so we can go and buy all the components that we put in here so we can show you something that's awesome and I think the home lab folks are going to absolutely love this with that let's get to it okay so starting out why don't we just look at this unit how it came real quick uh so first thing you're going to notice is that we do have a core i7 this is the core i7 12700t so it's a 35 watt TDP processor the 35 Watts I think is super important because frankly with a lot of Home lab notes it really doesn't matter if you have a much faster CPU what you want is really a lower power CPU because you know you don't want to pay those electric bills for a higher power one and also the lower power CPUs tend to yield lower noise and stuff and so you just don't want to hear them right and you'll see that this thing was nearly silent in our project timing micro review and that's why we're using this as a base beyond the core i7 though there really wasn't much more to the system I mean we got it for only a little over 500 on eBay but we didn't really get a lot of extra features but the nice thing is getting inside these systems they are super serviceable it's one screw you pop the cover off and now you're inside and taking a look at what we've got for just a little over 500 so there's a couple things so first off the memory in these is always kind of a bummer right we got a single channel of ddr5 and it's only a 16 gigabyte dim in there so that's okay but we're gonna upgrade that I'm going to show you a couple options it'll be nice if we actually could put this nicely and then on the SSD side there's one slot that was just not occupied and then on the other slot there's a 512 gig nvme SSD that's not very fast let's just be honest and so what I thought was why don't we take this unit and I'm just going to show you what I would do to make something that's better in two different flavors the first one is what I call kind of more of a value conscious one now there are three things that we're going to use that are in common between these bills first we're going to use just the overall shell second we're going to use the Intel ax 211 that gives us our Wi-Fi 6E option and then the other thing is just the processor now we're going to use proxmox but if you were going to use the VMware lab I would say actually just get the core i5 with all P chords instead of having the p and E course VMware is not planning on supporting heterogeneous course in for at least a while they told me so I would say stick with homogeneous cores with VMware but heterogeneous course of p plus e-cores if you're going to get anything else or you're going to use anything else okay so first off I think the the first configuration which is easiest is just however it comes right you don't have to spend a lot more and frankly it is much less expensive to get anything in a use system than it usually is to upgrade later but that starting point with the use system also can be quite interesting so for example um you know this system has a total of 16 gigabytes in a single dim now what I would personally do is upgrade this to a second 16 gig dim and give 32 gigabytes which I think is darn good but if you want to go a step further you can get two 32 gig dims and throw them in here and that gives you 64 gigabytes of memory which makes this a very capable node so I'm gonna do that right now and that said it takes less than a minute to go install two 32 gig dimms and they're pretty easy to find frankly now once that's done the next question is what are we going to do for networking frankly the one gig networking plus the Wi-Fi is okay but I think we could do something a little bit better and so for that we're going to pop out the little uh HP Flex iov2 module which has uh two USB ports which I love USB ports but we're not going to use them here and instead what we're going to use is we're going to use a two and a half gig ethernet module now if you want to find the model numbers for all the stuff we're going to have them Linked In the description but we'll also have main site articles and and forms post where all the stuff is so you can learn a little bit more about like you know what these are and what have you okay so when you have the Flexio V2 module what you're going to do is you just basically pop this little sucker in and it pops in like this and we're already there with our two and a half gig ethernet port so now we have a one gig ethernet port along with a two and a half gig ethernet port we have 64 gigabytes of memory that's pretty good but let's go a step further and let's just go add another SSD okay so for this we're gonna go and add a four terabyte rocket at 4 plus sabrin SSD these things are very fast I just want to point out one thing real quick which is William who does the marketing for saber now used to be our SSD reviewer on the sth main site and uh so that's how we got these drives and that's why we're using them there are of course other options but uh why not why not use something fun and fast because bill sent him and to install you literally just go pull up the little thermal flap you pop it in and then then it's one screw whoo okay so now after our arduous three minutes of installing stuff we have a 12 core 20 thread core i7 processor we have 64 gigabytes of memory a half terabyte Boot and vme SSD a four terabyte data SSD and in terms of networking we have one gigabit Ethernet two and a half gig ethernet and then also Wi-Fi 6E this is absolutely plenty and frankly this is a great desktop as well as a proxbox or other kind of you know Linux Ubuntu whatever virtualization server this thing is absolutely awesome at this point so why don't we go one step further and that's what we're gonna do next so let's start again with the ram 64 gigabytes that's not enough and it's nowhere even close to being enough so we got to go up there okay so for the memory instead of these 32 gig sodims we're gonna use these right here which are mushkin Redline non-binary dimms and what we mean by non-binary is that the capacity is not a power of two instead of being one two four eight sixteen thirty two gig dims these dimms are 48 gigabytes each so we have these non-binary ones so we get 248 gig dims for 96 gigabytes of memory well that was really hard right no no it was super easy okay uh now these uh now we have our 96 gigs of memory installed and something that you know a lot of folks don't know is that this system will actually recognize the non-binary memory I know a lot of folks these things are very new and sometimes some of the big OEM systems don't recognize the stuff right out of the box but this did so I was really surprised with that and it's just something that's kind of nice okay now that's done let's talk about storage for a sec now we already have that four terabyte drive in there but what if we went a little bit bigger what if uh what if instead of doing a four terabyte drive we did a mirrored four terabyte setup this is a dramless SSD not very fast and so I figure why even use that instead let's go pull out another sabrin rocket 4 plus uh four terabyte drive now you could use a terabyte ssds of course in this but those tend to be a lot more on a cost per terabyte basis and that's why you're using four terabyte drive it's the same reason actually that we're using the core i7 instead of the core I9 there is one thing though on on something like this that's really important that's different in the system so when you have one of these ssds you're going to see with a four terabyte SSD we have components both on the top as well as the bottom and you might ask well why does that matter well HP had by default these like little ah these little thermal pads that are in here and uh with these little thermal pads you can't actually put this SSD and have it live properly so what you have to do is actually pull out the little thermal pad and then you can go and install this thing very very easily now this system can support two pretty darn fast PCA Gen4 ssds like we have here but I do want to just point out that I think a lot of folks will want lower speed ssds especially when you have two of them just because um you know frankly this is going to be a little bit more of a struggle to cool for the system than the lower power lower speed ssds okay so let's talk about networking we already have our 96 gigs of memory we have eight terabytes of nvme ssds that are gonna be really cool when we show you how we're gonna set them up but then you know the networking kind of is not great right we have the Intel one gig Nick that's kind of standard on the motherboard but then we have this Flex i o Nick um which you know is okay a two and a half gig but we want something faster than two and a half gig right well what about if there was 10 gig and I'll just show you these side by side uh this is the two and a half gig this is the 10 gig you'll see that we actually have larger connectors on the 10 gig one so these are only for I think they might work on the G6 and now like g89 systems so if you want to go back you can totally go back and install these but this is a Marvel a Quantum Nick we'll have the part number of course down below and you can buy these things and put them directly into the system very easily now probably going to use brand Ryan's hands for installing this with some b-roll so thank you to Brian for doing that you pretty much just lined it up put it in place and you're ready to go it has some bonus content if you want to print a 3D bracket you can actually do a project like installing this innodisk n.2 to 10 gbase T adapter and get a second 10 gigabit Ethernet port we'll have more on this on the sth main site but it is possible we're just not going to do it for our main build okay so for a quick recap we have our 12 core core i7 processor 96 gigs of memory we have eight terabytes in two four terabyte nvme ssds and these are PCA Gen4 so they are wicked fast and then we also have our 10 gig ethernet our one gig ethernet and we have our Wi-Fi 6E so the next thing is like let's go install an OS on this and for this I want to install proxmox we've been using proxbox since I think like 2013 2014 or something like that so almost a decade in production in co-location and I have some thoughts on how I would set this up versus some other options out there okay now now it's time to set up proximox and this follows the normal proximox install there are two things though I want to point out that we're going to do the first one is that we're going to set our boot to a ZFS mirror right because it's really a good idea to have some kind of mirror in your home lab you may not want to do that and you may frankly not care if you are just like hey I'm going to back everything up I just want the maximum capacity you could do these two drives in RAID 0 and have eight terabytes you could go up to eight terabyte drives that's up to 16 terabytes there are a whole bunch of different things you could do for a little system like this so just because I always run proximox in raid one for boot drives that's what we're going to do here now the second thing is super important and that's that you want to make sure that the IP address and the Nick that you're using for your setup is the one gigabit Ethernet not the 10 gigabit Nic the reason for that is I personally really like to have an out-of-band-ish Management Port that I can go and connect to a dedicated management Network so what we're going to do here is we're going to use that one gig Network for our management getting to that management interface logging in Via SSH also doing things like doing all the updates and all that kind of stuff you would want to do and we're going to do that on the one gig Nick now once we're in proxmox that doesn't mean that we're not going to use that 10 gigabit Ethernet instead what we're going to do is we're going to log on we're going to do all of our normal setup stuff okay now before we do any of the virtual machines what I want to do real quick is I want to create a network bridge we're going to create that network bridge in proxmox on that 10 gig ethernet port now this is something that a lot of folks get confused with but the way to think about it is we just want to expose that 10 gig ethernet port to the world we don't necessarily need this thing to have its IP address because we're not going to be addressing the machine via that Port now if you're using ovs it's a pretty similar process but we're going to do the easy mode and just do the Linux Bridge here okay now let's just go through the process of creating a VM as an example and this one we're just going to use is a Docker Host this could be a kubernetes host it could just be a normal VM whatever you want now the first thing that we need to do is we need to go and get a Ubuntu image on here so we've just done that now since we did so many Hardware upgrades we get a ton of really cool features when we go build this VM for our storage we can put this on the ZFS raid one array so we just have automatically you know mirrored storage on here that's super easy in terms of memory we can add a ton of memory and actually a pretty good amount of CPU as well we're gonna put our networking set to the bridge that is associated with our 10 gig ethernet Network because that's obviously the one that we want all of our VMS to have access to if we want them to go fast and that was super easy other fun things you could do with this there are things like lxc containers for doing a file share an easy NFS file share you can also set up things like Samba NFS all that kind of stuff right on the ZFS shares as bare metal but it also might be a little bit easier to manage file sharing using an LLC container or VM since we have four terabytes of storage you have plenty to go and do things like just have a file share especially if you just have like documents and stuff that you want to share on your network and you might also want to do backups we have our Asus store on the network so we can totally go do that very easily by just importing that as a share and we're ready to go one of the nice things with proximox is that backup is super easy it's built in and you don't need other like third-party tools to go do it now if you want to do other things like have a little kubernetes cluster all built up on this thing there are plenty of guides on how to go do that you have plenty of CPU memory networking storage all that to go and build a kubernetes cluster on here overall though this is an awesome little box for a server now let's talk about power consumption real quick so we have a load that is running on this that we're running at about 75 load right now so CPU is being pretty taxed I would say okay and so real quick uh we this thing is now turned on and uh you know you can hear it's it's not very loud it's not silent you can you can hear a fan if you go right up to it but if it's sitting anywhere away from you you're just you're just not going to hear this thing in our 34 DBA noise floor Studio we're now pushing around 35 36 37 DBA something like that so this is still running very quiet even at 70 load which is awesome in terms of power consumption our idle power consumption is now up to about 11 Watts which is much higher than it was when we just had our base configuration and right now we're running in our 70 load or 75 load configuration we're running at about 42 to 45 Watts okay so for all these I like to have key Lessons Learned but for this one I think we're going to change that up a little bit I want to show you just some of the other things you can do so for example if you have the 10 gigabit Ethernet a lot of people are saying like hey I'd rather have SFP plus because that gives us access to like micro tick switches I totally get it um but if you do have 10g base T and you're looking for something that's relatively inexpensive we have uh this new hassivo unit over here we're gonna have a second one that's arriving later this week but this is a eight Port managed 10g base T switch we're going to do a review on pretty soon this thing is only 245 dollars we're waiting for the poe version which is coming but uh this thing is an awesome value especially for you know a 10g based t-switch and I know there are going to be a ton of people that are going to say hey Patrick you could use a mini PCs For example and you do a lot of reviews of mini PCS why are you not using one of those well I think that these things if you're gonna go and start doing things like replacing components I think it's nice to have one of these HP units where it's fairly straightforward and you can keep everything internal and the power consumption is pretty good I just really like these for that application but yeah you could totally use something else pretty popular of course is using something like an Intel Nook I think my challenge with the Intel Nook is frankly just that these things have gotten so loud now that the power on the Intel chips has gone up and when you're in this like little small form factor there's only so much you can do you need to have a fan running and when you get up into like you know using 90 Watts on the CPU or something like that you need to have a fan running pretty fast and that's why I think these things have become pretty loud and there are other units too and not just Intel for example you could use this little geekom as6 which is also a Asus PN 53 or something uh we're gonna have a review on that one probably on the sdh main site in a little bit and then there are other ones like for example the b-link units and you're gonna see we have two gtr7 Pros the gtr7 review non-pro is uh is probably gonna happen and that system's actually being tested right now which is why I couldn't unplug this one but these systems also can run two internal PCA Gen 4 nvme ssds they have two two and a half gig ethernet ports and frankly a pretty fast CPU and GPU they also cost quite a bit more and you're going to end up replacing some more expensive components which I think is a little bit of a bummer but one of the big things is like you know how do you get 10 gig ethernet on a system like this I think the way that you're going to get 10g ethernet on something like this is you're going to use a usb4 you know instead of Thunderbolt 3 you're going to use a thunderbolt 3 10 gig ethernet adapter and um and you can get SFP plus ones and also you can get you know 10g base t1s and all kinds of so I think there are options for using one of these but at the same time this thing costs over 300 more than the little HP unit that we got used even though it's relatively new and to me I don't know if I'd want to spend that extra 300 especially if when we ripped out all of the memory to get our 96 gigs we ripped out the ssds to put our two four terabyte things in there and also using a external Thunderbolt adapter means that we have something that you can easily unplug versus something that they screwed in 10 gig ethernet port on this which I tend to like a little bit better so would it be a bad idea to use something like this absolutely not I would just offer that instead of the gtr7 pro I probably use the base gtr7 if I were gonna go do this at the same time I just want to do something fun with the project tiny mini micro series and also just get to show you what a base level a kind of mid-range and then also a pretty high-end system looks like hey guys I hope you like this look at a monster tiny mini micro node let's face it this is a one liter PC that is pretty darn quiet it has a ton of capability really rivaling a lot of like the Xeon E5 V1 V2 servers that are out there and yet it's small and it sips power and hey if you did like this video why don't you share with some of your friends you can also join the sth YouTube channel so we can have a little bit of support to go buy components for these so you can give it a like click subscribe and turn on those notifications so you can see whenever we come out with great new videos and as always thanks for watching and have an awesome day

Channel: ServeTheHome

Views: 149,683

Keywords: servethehome, serve the home, 2.5gbe, intel, homelab, project tinyminimicro, tinyminimicro, hp, hp elite mini, hp elite mini 600 g9, hp elite mini 800 g9, 48gb ram, 48gb ddr5, 96gb ram, 96gb ddr5, proxmox, proxmox install, proxmox 8, proxmox ve, virtualization, vmware, mushkin, crucial, sabrent, sabrent rocket 4 plus, nvme ssd, 10gbe, 10gbe mini pc, 10gbase-t, flex io, 10gbe virtualization, innodisk, beelink, hasivo, home server, home lab, zfs

Id: HylKpDmwaFA

Length: 17min 50sec (1070 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 28 2023