I am considering doing something similar to what Wendel did last week in my home network. Currently I have two dedicated "Servers" in my network, one is for PFSense, running an old Core2Duo and 2 gigs of ram. I am not interested in visualizing this, and will be replacing this with newer lower power hardware in the future. I like the idea of having a dedicated router, even if its a waste of resources.
The other is a Celeron G1820 w/ 8 gigs of RAM and 3x 3TB WD Reds running FreeNAS. The FreeNAS box runs a Plex jail currently, but I would like to run more jails, sickbeard, coach potato bittorent sync/crashplan. I have 3 intel gige adapters in here.
But here comes my issue. I also have a Dell Inspiron 15R SE laptop sitting around I'm not using anymore. It has a Core i7 3612qm and 12GB of RAM. It has a single Gig-e ethernet port. I spent a good chucnk of money on this and would like to make use of it.
Would it be better to run Proxmox on the laptop, have it run a couple windows or Ubuntu VMs, one for Plex and the other for sickbeard, and coach potato and Bt Sync/crashplan? Are there any other neat and interesting things I can do?
Thanks for input
Also, It has been suggested that If i plan on running the laptop as a server, that I sould remove the battery because it may be a fire hazard. I've had this laptop in the past running 24/7 plugged into the wall with the battery in it. Is this a real concern?
I responded to your comment on the actual "Proxmox video" thread.
So le copy pasta:
Well the i7 3612QM has all the required specs to run virtualisation, so there are no problems there.
I do not see any point in trying to integrate the NAS box into a virtual server if you already have dedicated hardware for it.
TBH the single Gb ethernet is not going to hold the VM's operations back, although you may notice it if you start doing heavy data migration on of it.
As for the battery, as long as you keep it cool enough and you trust the charging circuit to not overheat and turn the whole thing (and possibly your house) into a smoldering mess. Although I would personally remove it.
I will say you want to make sure Proxmox doesn't try and use your wireless adapter as the primary NIC...I had a friend who used a laptop for his and we had to fight with that once for some reason...
Another thing I've accidentally learned while trying Proxmox on laptops is that they tend to have thermal throttling enabled. This is bad for virtualization because it just slows stuff down. But if you need cooling you're kind of stuck. That's why I don't recommend Proxmox on a laptop...unless maybe you can redneck together a better cooling system
I couldn't get Proxmox to use my NIC. I don't know why, but I couldn't get an IP address. So I just installed Ubuntu 14.10 for now until I can get a proper server, but it may be a while because this thing was streaming 3 1080p Plex transcodes last night with no issues.
Thermal problems have ANYWAYS been an issue with this laptop. What I did when I used it to game on my TV was simple, and I am using the same method now. I have a 5v wall wart hooked up to a 120mm YateLoon medium speed fan, and I have the laptop upside-down with the fan blowing into the intake on the bottom. The internal fan rarely ever spins up and the laptop remains cool to the touch, and its QUIET.
When you install Proxmox, just let it finish without an IP. Then run ifconfig and see if it detects the "eth0" interface AT ALL. If it doesn't, try adding it to the /etc/network/interfaces file
Under the part about the loopback interface add this:
auto eth0
allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address (ip)
netmask (probably 255.255.255.0)
gateway (probably 192.168.1.1 but whatever yours is)
