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? Written blog post on the quest to run 250 VMs! https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2024/07/proxmox-mini-pc-monster-running-150-virtual-machines/ Proxmox Kernel Samepage Merging (KSM) - https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Dynamic_Memory_Management Check out Tek2Cloud, another project I am working on: https://tek2cloud.com ★ Subscribe to the channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrxcWtpd1IGHG9RbD_9380A?sub_confirmation=1 ★ My blog: https://www.virtualizationhowto.com ★ Twitter: https://twitter.com/vspinmaster ★ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandon-lee-vht/ ★ Github: https://github.com/brandonleegit ★ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/VirtualizationHowto/100092747277326/ ★ Discord: https://discord.gg/Zb46NV6mB3 ★ Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/brandonleevht/ 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