Reply To: minisforum ms-02 ultra, ms-03 using proxmox ve for vms? Hi all, Been looking at next potential upgrade for my existing HPE Microserver and the new microserver is quiet expensive and also vmware now requires license as opposed to free…

[kev2021]

Thanks, Yes, i believe VMWare is still popular in business but they have the advantange of more cash and can write some of the tax off etc.  HPE Microservers used to be a good relatively cheap way to get a home server setup with VMWare but now seeing the price of the servers has goe up significantly and now vmware stopped the free version, many people have looked at alternatives and I’m thinking this is the better way to go now than sticking with HPE Microserver as when a new version of vmware comes out, it will likely be unsupported on microserver gen 11 and so the circle begins whereas with proxmox VE, its free, and it seems to be more of a long term solution in terms up probably just updating proxmox ve to latest version on existing hardware to get support for a new windows version.  The gen 10 for example doesn’t have TMP2.0 and the version I have of esxi doesn’t support win11.  I believe proxmox doesn’t have these limitations.

The price isn’t overly cheap for the minisforum ms-02 ultra or the ms-03 but I believe I would get longer use out of it before I get constrained by limitations both in terms of ram and also in terms of VM OS I can created.  I believe my existing Esxi doesn’t support win 11 and also not the server 2025, i think 2022 is last server OS its supports. Whereas minisforum hardware wouldn’t restrict the use, if anything just software upgrade of proxmox and I’m good to go. Also like you said, no hardware raid needed.  Albeit it only supports I think 3 NVMe’s. I guess I’d have to setup the Proxom VE on 1 NVME and setup my VMs on the other NVMEs and have them mirrors to have some redundancy due to drive failure.

I also believe Proxe VE has a backup software but I’ve not looked into it fully to see if that is free or paid.  I think I read the free version just backs up whole VM whereas paid does incremental or maybe differential so its a smaller backup after first main backup. I have a NAS I could potentially back up to if it allows that and is compatible etc but that too has a space limit so I don’t want to do full backups every week etc as would take too long to backup multiple VMs and would use a high amount of space.

Definitely considering it but at the moment its too price as 256GB of ram I believe is over £1k, the ms-02 I think is just over £1k and then I got the NVMe’s of which I’d have to have min 2 x 2TB NVMe’s and prob 1TB NVMe for Proxmox VE to allow for upgrades, any addons I later find, maybe even storing ISO files so can deploy a VM from the IOS when creating new etc. so I’m prob looking at £3-4k all in as a guess?

They are selling the ms02-ultra with Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX (192GB ECC + 2TB SSD): £2,679 as an example so not even 256Gb ram.

Kev

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