Hello,
I was wondering if there are any plans, or even the possibility of a HomeLab product similar to the 45 Drives Proxinator.
Thank you!
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Hey, currently we do not have any plans for this in the works.
I’d be curious to see what you and the other community members would be interested in for a Homelab-proximator server?
Nothing is stopping you from installing proxmox on the HL15 directly, as many customers, including myself, have Proxmox running on our home lab servers
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I’d be interested in a 2U option from 45HomeLab similar to the proximator. I recently purchased three Dell R640’s to run my proxmox cluster with ceph. They offer a good balance of density and noise for the price. I’d love it if I had enough space for 3 HL15’s to run my setup but, sadly, I don’t. 
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Strong ditto on the idea that Homelab users would like better NVMe options from 45 Homelabs. That said, given the very diverse needs across these forums, I feel like the better option here might be to enable Proxinator type functionality by offering us all a set of Cases (2U / 4U) with swappable internal Backplanes. This could solve the Proxinator use case being asked for here because 45 Homelabs could just sell you a 2U or a 4U Case with a modular backplane built into the chassis. “
Then at time of ordering, you go in and decide what kind of Backplane do you want to build? Do you want say all SATA drives in a 4U case (ex: like say today’s HL15). Or do you want to pay a bit more for Tri-Mode (SAS, SATA, NVMe), but in exchange have far more flexibility down the road? Or, if we had a fully modular backplane, do you maybe want a bit of both?
For anyone doing mixed SATA / NVMe builds right now, this is a huge help because you can’t really fit that many NVMe drives in an HL15 for key workloads such as say a ZFS, Ceph, etc. build (really anything where you need more than a small handful of NVMe drives) and that becomes very, very limiting very, very quickly if you want to do caching pools, high speed NVMe storage pools, etc.
Thus a modular backplane would really help us all better futureproof these cases while still allowing 45 Homelabs to pay for their on-going R&D costs as we would buy new Backplane boards over time to upgrade our cases to new storage form factors (ex: EDSFF, which by the way is not 1 form factor either).
All of the above is a concept I called “LEGOs for Backplanes” on 1 of the other threads where the 45 Homelabs Team was soliciting feedback on their future backplane designs. I know a lot of us would be really excited to see what the 45 Homelabs Mad Scientists could bring to life there.
So for anyone interested in joining the community discussion and ideas around what we’d like to see from the 45 Homelabs in terms of Backplanes, please come join our thread where we discuss the idea of 45 Homelabs building us “LEGOs for Backplanes.”
As I understand it, this would be on their next gen cases and maybe even retrofitted to the HL15 v1.0 given that the HL15’s backplane is upgradeable and removable. That said, this is all speculative at this point. So if you like the idea, then please go upvote it so the team over at 45 Homelabs knows what you’d like to see them build for us next.
IMHO, the LEGO Backplane idea is an idea that is both very elegant and yet could also very flexibly scale up and down in terms of both cost and functionality. Thus it would serve the diverse set of users and the diverse set of use cases that we all are.
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This is a very interesting solution for small IT startups. Not all IT startups receive large funding, especially in the EU, so cost-effective alternatives are crucial. Using virtual machines (VMs) for each user can be more economical than providing high-powered machines for everyone. VMs also allow for specialized setups—some tools run better on (also are supported only if they are installed) Ubuntu, others on Red Hat, etc.
IT startups don’t always need massive storage; sometimes 15–60 TB is sufficient for a long time. Many small IT companies don’t have racks or dedicated server rooms in their offices. Products like the 15HL offer great value in terms of price and quality, but not everyone needs that much storage. A more compact solution, such as a home server with 6–8 NVMe u.2 bays in a tower/rackable case—potentially even smaller than the HL15—could meet the needs of many startups.
This observation comes from discussions with a few friends running very small IT companies (5–15 employees) in my area, many of whom prefer not to rely on the cloud, and I also have my own startup, and I am looking for a more robust solution than the current one that I have.
The 45 drive computer server is also very interesting, the problem is that it is a 1U unit.