Using Proxmox on low end hardware

Proxmox
1

I’ve been lucky to receive a pair of HP X311 Data Vaults that are going to be lightweight file servers. They are old and feature slow processors and only 2GB RAM. Performance is reasonable, with write speeds of 40 MB/s on to a single disk (CT with ZFS storage).

But I have trouble with them dropping out of the cluster and seeing high RAM usage (minimum 1.5GB/2GB). They won’t run any containers aside from a barebones NAS and possibly pihole. Would disabling the GUI (can’t find this in the documentation) and upgrading the DDR2(!) RAM give me enough boost?

The nodes do not keep in sync with the rest is a problem, but my corosync log folder is empty. Any idea where to start hunting this down?

2

I haven’t noticed Proxmox to be especially resource intensive and I’ve run nodes on a lot of laptops, though admittedly none quite as sparsely provisioned as the boxes you’ve got here.

You can disable the web interface with systemctl disable pve-proxy (and systemctl stop pve-proxy to immediately stop it), but if you’re doing that, you’d be better off with raw KVM and LXC on Debian.

I honestly wouldn’t expect a lot out of these, but I bet you could get away with it by increasing the RAM as much as you are able. I don’t think I’d consider putting any hypervisor on a machine with less than 4GB at the absolute minimum (8 would be much better).