I’m currently running a ryzen 7 5700g with 32gb ddr4 ram on an Asus prime b450m-a board, no GPU obviously. I’ve had this up and running for almost a year but other than that this is all new to me. It’s running proxmox with a Samsung 1tb m.2 drive handling the VM’s and proxmox.
VM’s currently include
Windows 10 to run blue iris with a limited number of POE cameras at my house. There is a 4tb WD purple HDD handling only the recorded video.
Pi hole
Truenas Scale running as a nas on the system that backs up the computers around the house regularly. It has two 4tb HGST HDD in raid 1.
Home assistant
This leaves me with 1 core not assigned and limited RAM. While I plan to add another 32gb of matching RAM, I’m doing the cheap thing and waiting for it to go on sale.
My questions comes from looking around on AliExpress during there 11.11 sale right now. I’d like to have a few more resources to mess around with. Would like to mess around with Linux, have been reading up on pfsense in a VM etc. Is switching to a e5 cpu a stupid idea? Nothing crazy but maybe something like a 2640, 50, 60 v4? Obviously this causes me to also purchase a new MB but I’m wondering if I really need this or if I’m just looking to spend money haha. I know my power consumption would go up and I worry about the core performance when it comes to things blue iris.
Thanks
Múltiple vms can still share that one core. Unless you’re crunching numbers in a vm, the core usage is likely not reaching 100%, and it can still be shared between vms. It does not exactly translate to 1 to 1
You don’t “assign” cores to VMs. When you create a VM and give it vCPUs, you are telling the host how many threads it can use at a given time. The hypervisor (in this case proxmox) has its own task scheduler. As work comes in from the VMs, it assigns them to available threads on the physical processor.
For example, if you have a quad core CPU, you can create as many VMs as you have RAM and other resources for and give them ALL 4 vCPUs. So you can have a single 4c/4t CPU and 10 VMs with 4 vCPUs each. Proxmox will simply balance the load using its own task scheduler and assign work to the physical CPU based on load, available threads, etc.
If you want to assess whether or not your physical processor is overloaded, you need to look at the summary for the host and see if the CPU usage and Server load stats to see if you are overusing the CPU.
Awesome thank you everyone! So I’ll stick with what I have for now as it is more power efficient. I’m still going to toss the extra ram in when I see a good price I think.
You could set up monitoring of the VMs & host and determine if you have, or are approaching, a performance bottleneck. Also, if you do want increase capacity, it would be better adding a second node, so you have some redundancy in your lab.