Thin Client w/ NIC for VMs and Firewalls HP T740

In our HP T740 Thin Client review, we take a different look at this machine from the lens of Project TinyMiniMicro as a virtualization host

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Where to Find STH
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Other STH Content Mentioned in this Video
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Timestamps
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00:00 Introduction
02:22 External Hardware Overview
06:34 Internal Hardware Overview
11:29 HP ThinPro
12:02 The PCIe Slot of Possibility
14:56 Performance
15:47 STH Readers Using for Proxmox VE, VMware, and pfSense
18:55 Key Lessons Learned
21:27 More Resources
21:50 Wrap-up

[JonWilliams]

Been running a T730 as a pfsense box for over 12 months without any issues with an Intel quad port nic. Repurposed it recently to a kubernetes node and added a Coral m.2 to the A-E keyed port. It is now a dedicated machine for Frigate, Compreface and Double-Take. Running 4 Cameras with inference times of around 8msec. It has basically become my NVR. Love it.

[ergosteur]

Been running my pfSense on the T620 Plus with an old dual port Intel NIC since that video. been absolutely solid, fast and silent and a great value. The PCIe slot is huge for running virtualization/networking.

I did discover that some of the Acer Veriton 1L PCs have an externally accessible PCIe slot as well.

[walteradamsbe]

On any Tiny/Mini/Micro video of STH, my first thought is always: "can I run Proxmox on this with pfSense and 5 to 7 extra linux VMs?" The answer is generally "No" but the awesomeness of this video is that the answer is "Yes". Still looking for a replacement of my 6 year-old CompuLab IPC2 units which have 16GB RAM, a Core i7-4600U, 6 x1 Gbps NICs and, get this, run fanless at 15W TDP !!! Yes i can run up to 7 VMs on a unit like this but they are 6 years old now and going critical in terms of MTBF expectations. Still haven't quite found anything like it though.

[nikolaosoikonomopoulos]

I have a T620 Plus with Intel quad port nic running pfSense for the last 8 months without an issue, fast, silent controlling 2 unifi switches, 1 nvr with 6 poe cameras, 4 opewrt 20.02 dummy access points. Thanks a lot for your great videos and suggestions.

[jztpnt]

Full memory encryption is a big plus for ryzen embedded series

[robertcraane]

I buy these regurlarly for € 129 to € 179. Nice machines, also for emulation, etc... And through my foundation I send them to deprived schools in the Philipines, thanx to some friendly sponsors!

[ivanguag]

I just watched this, 1 month ago I had the idea about using a thin client and 4 Gbps NIC card for PFSense and I did it with the hp T620 Plus, of course all 2nd hand, working as a charm. I enjoyed this video, probably in a couple of years I will upgrade to this one. Nice videos and keep them coming, I'm enjoying the Mini Tiny Micro a lot.

[spiralbrain]

This thing is a beast, I've been using this as a desktop PC for over 6 months now. The only thing wrong with this is a bug in the cooling fan. Some others have reported this where the fan does not change speed with temperature at times. Pretty minimalistic daily use system.

[djjackson]

FWIW, is love to see this updated to the new recent 6000 APUs that are coming out soon.

[Soruk]

I've been using a T610 as my broadband router for several years running ClearOS. I cheaped out on my WAN connection using a 100Mbps USB2 ethernet adapter, but as I'm on VDSL with a max speed of 80Mbps (and I get about 40) that has never proved to be a problem. Also, being a Linux box it handles my custom VPN endpoint and my Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel. I got the machine as a freebie from work when they had decommissioned a pile of the things.

[davidtyorke]

Maybe time to add a dedicated forum for this kind of "franken-server". There's going to be more and more hardware going into the secondary market that has CPUs with VM extensions and other capabilities great for STH types of applications.

[therealb]

Back when I lost the chance to make the T620+ pfsense boxes & watched their prices skyrocket, I said to myself how long will it be before the next gen T730 or T740 can be repurposed like that. I don't want to repeat the same mistake again.

EDIT: Less than 30 min after this video the prices on ebay are $415-$535. Damn I can't believe you got it for $270.

I remember the T620+ was supposed to be $50-90 but after the STH effect they skyrockted in price to $150-$200.

[pcislocked]

I love those mini boxes and want to run pfsense on them for all kinds of purposes, but my 50mbps vdsl internet coming to home makes it really hard to justify such effort and invesment.

[foureight]

The Dell Wyze 5070 is also a great deal for pFsense box. I am currently using one as a vm box to host pihole and unbound along with a few other services. Running intel clear linux server os will help you get the most out of it. Another box was loaded with chromeos using brunch and connected to the TV for my mom to use for video chat and youtube viewing. The 4k support on the box is very handy.

[marcogenovesi]

yay! finally a device where you can put a PCIe quad gigabit card

[fluffyfloof]

Quite a powerful little machine, and an interesting use case. I'm still in love with my little HPE MicroServer Gen10+ - you've reviewed these as well. It's got an I350-T4 on-board, and i did the least expensive upgrade to i3-9100F. I've got a killer deal on an Intel DC P3700-400 for caching my ZFS pool. It's so cute, and runs my whole home LAN, OPNsense router VM with PCIe pass-through. (I would've preferred PFsense, but it wouldn't handle virtio network IFs …i suspect PFsense requires booting the VM in legacy BIOS mode, but it's too late now [it's fine]) I've recently come across multi-bay USB HDD enclosures, like HBA-over-USB (UASP), of course it's not an actual HBA, but it has topological similarities and sufficient bandwidth. Only the lack of an i350-T4 keeps me from running a NUC. ECC memory as well, that's nice to have.

[StevePatak]

Wooo! T620 running pfsense is the bomb.

[ljufine]

Awesome little machine! As you said, the prices of these things soared high! lol

[jimscomments]

I own three T740s. The first one is three years old which I enabled VT-d in he BIOS and it installed Proximal VE using UEFI perfectly. I actually installed a LSI 9300 8 port raid card with IT firmware and used an IcyDock 8 port Express cage to do drive passthrough for a TrueNAS VM. The VMs run great so I bought two more used T740 that still were under warranty, Proxmox hung using UEFI at the install. It did install in Legacy but got "KVM not available" and "BIOS not enabling VT-d" Proxmox will not enable hardware virtualization for the VMs which make the VMs so slow they are useless. Since the two T740s were in warranty I contacted them and after a month of phone calls and even though I have a working T740 they said since it's not HP software they aren't going to replace them.

[johnstancliff]

love these units, I have a dell Wyse 7020 that replaced a HP laptop, use it all the time...