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/2...

Proxmox Kernel Samepage Merging (KSM) - https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Dynamic_...

Check out Tek2Cloud, another project I am working on: https://tek2cloud.com

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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