Hi,
I have outgrown my current home lab setup which currently runs many docker containers a Synology NAS and looking to build a Proxmox server/cluster on one or multiple tiny mini PCs.
I will be running small docker containers for things like home assistant, radarr, sonarr, grafana and maybe prometheus. Again nothing crazy in terms of resources but I would like to have some room to play around with other projects like kubernetes.
Here are few deals I'm eyeing and can't decide to get one newer system or 3 older ones for essentially same price.
3 x Lenovo Thinkcentre M900 Quad-Core i5-6400T 2.2GHZ 12GB 120GB SSD - £165
3x Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q Mini PC Intel i3-7100T 3.4Ghz 12GB 256GB - £150.00
1 x Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q Tiny PC - i5-8400T - 8GB RAM - 256GB SSD - £145
I'm leaning towards lenovo mini PCs because I will be able to add 4 port nic via pci riser card.
M720q with i5-8400T has 6 cores and 6 threads plus intel 630 gpu which will be useful for plex transcoding.
On the other hand M910q with i3-7100T has only 2 core and 4 threads but also got intel 630 gpu. I will be able to get 3 of them for a price of just one M720q.
Lastly i5-6400T got 4 cores and 4 threads. Extra 2 cores more than M910q with i3-7100T but older cpu with intel 530 gpu which might not be as powerful plex transcoding
I'm thinking to go with just one M720q Tiny PC - i5-8400T mainly because of the cores count and intel 630 gpu. Obviously I will add min. 32GB ram.
I guess running 3 machines will use more power but they are already fairly low power so lets not take that into account for decision making ;)
Let me know your thoughts.
Also one thing to consider is that running 3 Proxmox machines will allow you to use HA (High Availability). Meaning if one of your hosts go down, others can pick up the slack.
Just one node means everything depends on it.