Proxmox on Erying Motherboards! - Testing Hybrid CPUs in Virtual Machines

Proxmox dev here. We have some workstations running with 12700k/13700k and I can't remember any ongoing stability issues that were CPU related. The only stability problem we encountered (AFAIR) was too high clocked memory speeds (early DDR5 modules though). If you can replicate the hangs/crashes maybe you could open a bug report with logs etc. on our bug tracker? Edit: to clarify, our development workstations run with Proxmox VE of course 😅

I wrote the code to implement the CPU Affinity feature in proxmox. (Dot on the Proxmox Forums) I haven't tried using P vs E cores for gaming VMs, but I do leverage affinity for E cores to force lower power profiles on the CPU. By pinning some of my constant-load VMs to E cores, they are never responsible for putting the CPU into a high power draw state. This saves ~20W of power on average in my usage (security system designed to run off battery backup). It looks like my comments on this video are being immediately deleted after posting. Hopefully this comment won't disappear crosses fingers

Thanks for doing that rundown Jeff, pretty interesting stuff. Its cool to understand what the limitations might be with these different core layouts

Great video! Was very entertained with all the chaotic permutations of results. I think I read somewhere that virtualising a Proxmox VM, and then virtualising Windows within that leads to better(or rather more stable) results.

Cheers Jeff! Enjoying a Coronado Brewing Orange Ave wit. Excellent video, your Erying series really interests me for my homelab cluster i am planning on building, thank you for the upload!

I am running MINISFORUM MS-01 and don't have any of these issues. Super interesting to see.

I have been running Proxmox on my 12th Gen i7 (8p/4e + HT) for 2 months now, passing trough the GPU to Win11Pro & Fedora Linux VM. I did not have a single issue, and it is rock solid. I only assign 10 out of 20 threads to any of the VMs. I an not treading a hyper-tread core, as something you can assign to the VM, but for Proxmox to use when needed/possible. - I will add some more workloads to proxmox, and investigate the stability. Keep up the great work!

Thanks for covering the big/little proxmox setup. I've been wary of dropping the cash to try it. Hope to see some future updates around this where you get it to work.

This was a very interesting video Jeff. Always very interested in the virtualisation topics and learned a lot here !

if efficiency cores can be statically assigned in proxmox, i would definitely assign them to LXC containers and try to run them :(

I'm actually curious about one thing, I am not a drinker, so the parts about beer etc at the end, I usually skip and go to the next video, I'm wondering if that hurts your analytics with people doing that or if I"m just an outlier.. great video as always, thanks man

The channel Hardware Haven used a 13th Gen CPU with Proxmox and didn't report any problems. Maybe because he didn't run at full power. You should ask him if his Mini PC crashes at full load.

actually, this gives me an idea. What if instead of running laptop cpus you just aggressively undervolted/underclocked a similarly specced desktop cpu? Surely you could get pretty similar performance levels at similar power levels, with the added bonus of not being ebay specials. Although that is part of the fun i suppose.

This video was perfectly timed as I was just checking out these Erying boards. I'm pretty happy with my current homelab (P360 Ultra) but i was eyeing the ITX boards for a low power gaming system. They are definitely priced better than the minisforum stuff.

Thank you Jeff! You always answer all my proxmox questions & ideas! 😊

I ran proxmox on a 13900k. It hosted 2 plex servers both with their own gpus and a truenas vm with hba passthrough. I didn't notice any stability issues and all 3 vms ran smooth for the entire time. None of which were Windows. Maybe theres something with KVM and Windows on Big/Little arch.

Great video. Been wondering about this for a while now.

I suspect it's the boards that are unstable, MCE usually indicates a hardware error.

last year i intentionally opted for the 10th gen i9 in my home server build just to avoid the weird core sizes.

When running a single VM, I can confirm that Proxmox has effectively identical performance as bare metal on heterogeneous cores. I have a 13700K system with 64GB RAM. When I gave a Win11 VM all cores + 60GB RAM (4GB left alone for Proxmox itself), it gave pretty much the same benchmark results across the board as an identical bare metal Win11 install. I also ran single-threaded performance tests, not just full blast benchmarks. From that, it seems that P and E core scheduling was comparable for that scenario. That said, I don't know the intricacies of Proxmox CPU scheduling so it might behave differently with multiple VMs splitting the resources vs. one VM that's given everything.