- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Thought this might be helpful as a lot of these mini PCs are hitting the used market.
Thought this might be helpful as a lot of these mini PCs are hitting the used market.
I’ve been running OPNsense as a VM in Proxmox for a year on an AliExpress box that doesn’t have ECC. If I might ask, why do you have a requirement for ECC?
Before this box, I ran a Dell R230 with pfSense but got tired of the noise and 40 watt power draw.
I’ve had zero issues without ECC, so I’m just curious about your need for it.
There are really two reasons ECC is a “must-have” for me.
I don’t care about ECC in my desktop PCs, but for anything “mission-critical,” which is basically everything in my server rack, I don’t feel safe without it. Pfsense is probably the most critical service, so whatever machine is running it had better have ECC.
I switched from bare-metal to a VM for largely the same reason you did. I was running Pfsense on an old-ish Supermicro server, and it was pushing my UPS too close to its power limit. It’s crazy to me that yours only pulled 40 watts, though; I think I saved about 150-175W by switching it to a VM. My entire rack contains a NAS, a Proxmox server, a few switches, and a couple of other miscellaneous things. Total power draw is about 600-650W, and jumps over 700W under a heavy load (file transfers, video encoding, etc). I still don’t like the idea of having Pfsense on a VM, though; I’d really like to be able to make changes to my Proxmox server without dropping connectivity to the entire property. My UPS tops out at 800W, though, so if I do switch back to bare-metal, I only have realistically 50-75W to spare.