Proxmox VE on Intel NUC 8th Generation

My first Proxmox server is a full tower. We are talking about the original CoolerMaster Cosmos S case. I needed to replace my PVE server as soon as possible. However, it was not an easy thing to do because of some requirements that I have and cost.

• Need to be low power
• Need to be smaller than m-itx if possible
• Supports at least 32GB RAM
• The server should be able to handle at least 10 VMs

After browsing around for weeks, I settled with the Intel NUC. The homelab community seems to like the NUC. Based on what the community said, I bought an Intel NUC 8th Gen i7 model NUC8i7BEH back in November of 2019. I was aiming for the i5 BEH model, but somehow the retailers raised the price to the point that the price was almost the i7 BEH.

If you are curious, these are the parts I purchased for this build

• e size is a bit bigger than Amazon Echo Dot.Intel NUC 8 Mainstream Kit (NUC8i7BEH)
• Samsung 32GB DDR4 2666MHz RAM (M471A4G43MB1)
• Kingston A400 240G M.2 2280
• ADATA SU760 512GB (ASU760SS-512GT-C)

This is my very first Intel NUC. This box is tiny. I installed Proxmox VE version 6.1 on the M.2 NVME and format the SSD in ZFS. Restored my VMs and containers from the backup to the new PVE NUC server. And everything is running smoothly since November 2019. I might replace the ADATA with Crucial, but so far the whole build exceeded my expectations.

I was able spin up 10 virtual machines, 2x vCPU, 2GB RAM each, easily. I was able to add my EVE-NG to the new server. The EVE-NG VM has six vCPU and 12GB RAM. For those who uses EVE-NG, I was able to run 4x Juniper vMX, 10x Cisco IOL, 6x VyOS easily.

Two weeks ago, I purchased another Samsung 32GB SODIMM for the NUC. By the way, Intel spec’d this NUC to support up to 32GB of RAM, but NUC users reported that box can support up to 64GB RAM. I installed the 32GB Samsung RAM and the system recognized the additional RAM. The Proxmox node dashboard shows the additional RAM.

I am running the EVE-NG lab and some other VMs and containers. Figure 1 is what the node dashboard is reporting.

Cheers!