250 Virtual Machines on a Proxmox Mini PC

This was such a fun experiment to see how many virtual machines you can realistically get on a modern mini PC with 96 GB of memory. I tested using the Geekom AE7 with the Ryzen 7840HS processor with 16 threads and 96 GB of DDR5 memory. See just how far I was able to get running VMs on a mini PC! Did I reach 250?

Introduction - 0:00
Overview of how Mini PCs are great for home lab - 0:32
Mini PC I am using for the test - 1:00
Overview of the VM template in Proxmox - 1:47
Starting with 50 virtual machines - 2:46
80, 100, 115, 125 virtual machines - 3:06
Talking about RAM usage - 3:21
How Proxmox handles memory overcommit - 3:43
Kernel Samepage Merging deduplicates memory pages - 4:05
140, 150, 180 virtual machines - 5:13
Going for broke - 200 VMs and then 250! - 5:29
Looking at 200 VMs in Proxmox - 5:50
Talking more about memory management in Proxmox 6:00
Upping the number of VMs and IO delay - 6:10
210 VMs running - 8:00
The VMs are responsive and able to do work, running stress utility - 8:27
Cloning more! 9:11
Reaching 250 VMs! 10:15
99% memory 99% CPU - 10:29
Launching stress utilities in VMs - 10:48
Discussing random VMs powered off - 11:39
Looking at VMs that are powered off - 12:16
Discussing idle virtual machines - 13:03
Concluding comments - 14:06

[dave-]

Great for schools and home labs.
What this demonstrates to me is how stable Proxmox was.

[itguy]

This experiment is very interesting, you pushed the limit, I think it is already possible to replace VMs in small companies, real enterprise environment, the cost is much lower, as long as a disaster recovery plan is applied including backups and clones using mini PCs. The investment and maintenance will still be much cheaper than the current servers. Thanks for the video.😊

[isLife-iflz]

Very interesting experiment!

You could also use Terraform or Ansible to automate the template cloning, must have been tiring doing the full clone 250 times!

[armandosreis]

Great test. I would have like to see the power drawn from the system and also the temperatures it rose to. Those can have a negative impact in the life expectancy of your hardware, so please be aware of this if you try to consolidate your entire homelab into a miniPC :)

[markmonroe]

Excellent presentation. Thank you. Really enjoyed this one. Even more impressive since that CPU only has 8 actual cores with hyperthreading. I think this test really shows how good both AMD processors are and also Proxmox.

[robertlijkendijk]

Dear lord, did you really create 250 VM clones manually? That must have been quite an undertaking…

Interesting video! Very cool to see this amount of VMs running on such a small box, and how proxmox deals with this amount of memory overcommit.

[seanwoods]

Thanks for putting this together. I agree the new mini PCs are amazing the only thing I miss is my ilo ports from my servers.

[pbrigham]

This thing has more processor power than any server from 10 years ago....

[davidfarrell]

My homelab is exaclty as you describe. A Dell mini PC with 2 x 2TB m.2 and 64gb of DDR4 with 8 VMs and backup to an external drive (Not PBS yet). Its exactly what I need and have spare with no m.2 or ram in case I have hardware issue. Could bring it online but the cost and power consumption (even though 10w on idle). These are very capable but what I see is there are very few youtube channels that focus on these setups. They mostly focus on labs or use clusters and NAS and multiple devices in a rack etc. Most dont need or have that but find it hard to get material for managing a single proxmox nuc. Be great to see more of that type of content.

[jasonfreeman]

Why cloud? This is unreal. Imagine a small lab with 10 of these running. Imagine they’re not running VMs but containers. Wow!

[ewenchan]

It REALLY depends on what your VMs/LXC containers are doing though.

It's one thing to be able to SPIN UP 250 VMs.

It's another thing to be able to automatically run 250 instances of prime or stress-ng or something that's either memory, CPU, and/or iGPU intensive.

Have each of the 250 VMs open up 250 Chrome tabs and let's see how well it will or won't be able to handle that.

250 VMs, with most of them being idle, doesn't really demonstrate much.

[DivergenTech]

Great Experiment man, I wonder how many VMs can a N100 handle with 16gb

[kingneutron]

Keep up the good work.I suspect the number of actual productive VMs on your current setup would be around the 25-or-less mark, would be interesting to script a test on a 2nd PC that pulls webpages and DB data from random VMs on the proxmox server in parallel. Responsiveness is also going to be limited by the SSD and whether you are mirroring or not

[chrisumali]

Thanks for the demo and info. This is great, and makes me wonder if I should scrap my power hungry HP DL 360 G8. Have a great day

[AdHdEntertainmentLLC]

This is awesome. Given my struggles of running two VM's on my daily driver laptop with 32 gigs of ram on a 4core gaming laptop with a 1650 Nvidia graphics card. Makes me really hope I can win the minisforum mini PC. As I'm trying to move from my current govt non IT role I really need something with more power!! Can't believe you had 250 VM's running. I don't need that many.

[honumoorea]

I understand that maybe there is fun doing that, but most linux applications would use LXC, drastically reducing this memory print that you got with VMs.
I'm using an old 7100U with 16Go for my home assistant and some small things like adguard, frigate...and this old cpu hold it very well, using 10-15W of power (4x 4k cameras).

[peteradshead]

I like you to try running 250 windows 11 machines next and see how they run.
My proxmox is a bit of a mixed bag where I try to run them as a lxc if I can, but sometime it's just easier to even linux machine to run as a VM.
I would say running real life Linux apps like, SMB server, frigate, jellyfin, pi-hole, databases and graphs etc, about 1 meg minimum is more realistic, on my system it's ZFS which is grabbing most of the memory for cache .

[JamesGreen-gvyn]

You made a comment about the IO Delay going up. Would like to see a video about this specifically. Back when I had Proxmox servers that had regular old hard disk drives with spinning platters, I don't remember ever seeing this type of behavior. It was only with SSDs that I started to notice it. It also appears that the type of SSD can make a huge difference in this and many posts I've read indicate that an "Enterprise grade" SSD is required for Proxmox. But I haven't found a good definition or explanation for what an Enterprise grade SSD means.

[marcoschirrmeister]

Very strange experiment. As a next step let each VM actually do something with its 2GB memory. Otherwise, what's the point?

[SB-qmwg]

That Mini PC has more horsepower than my 4U homelab server