I have a 42u rack with a poweredge r710 r720 and a md1200. Proxmox with ~40 VMs and containers. R710 runs freenas and it just holds back up snapshots of VMs.

I want to downsize. It’s too bulky. I live in an apartment. Carrying It up to the 3rd floor wasn’t something I ever wanna go through again and it doesn’t look natural in my room. Sticks out too far.

I’m running all the normal homelab stuff. Plex, docker, apache, nginx, pfsense, grafana, bitwarden, nextcloud, ansible, pihole, vscode server, kali and wazuh and a handful of other VMs.

I have 96gb ddr3 ecc right now and I’m using 76gb of it.

Looking at desktop cpus they only support 128gb. I’d like something up to 256gb so I don’t ever hit the cap since I’m pretty close. I don’t think I need ecc.

They also only have ~25 pcie lanes. My xeon has 40 pcie lanes and it’s a decade old.

I don’t know much about pcie lanes. Maybe 25 is enough? I’d want to have a quad port nic, maybe a 10gb sfp+ card, an onboard m.2 nvme drive and a nvme expansion card that holds 4 m.2 drives.

 

Are there any SFF options that aren’t enterprise grade or rack mounted? I want a mid tower or smaller that I can just put on my desk. Then I’m gonna sell my whole rack. I don’t need ipmi or idrac. They’re nice but I’ve logged into idrac like 5 times in the last 3 years.