How many VMs do you think you'll want to ever run concurrently? ( because you may want to consider grabbing an inexpensive quad-core or more CPU while you can, maybe on boxing day sales or something)
Virtualization for multiple machines per core does work fine, but you may want to have spare horesepower in that regard
In any case, I would immediately suggest doubling your RAM. 32GB is overkill, but for anyone running mostly linux VMs, 8GB to 16GB is plenty to work with. Keep in mind, most hypervisors allow you to add/remove RAM allocation any time, with zero effect, except you must shutdown the VM when you do it.
Thanks for the advice. Unfortunately the HDA box is maxed at 4GB RAM. I may have to try and get another MB so I can use more RAM. Since it's so cheap, 16GB would not be too bad.
As for how many VMs, I plan on running 1 for Amahi of course and maybe 1-2 for testing and playing. Those would not be running all the time though, only for a few hours at a time. I do that now with Virtualbox on my desktop machine. Ironically my desktop is a quad-core machine with 16GB, so I guess I could switch them around too.
I was hoping to be able to run using the existing HDA, but sounds like that might not be an option.
Keep in mind, with Proxmox, it creates a LVM volume group for initial storage of drive images and containers. Every time you add a drive that won't be exclusive to a VM, it gets added to that LVM group. The effects of mixing SSD and HDD in an LVM may not be good (but they also may not be bad).. I would figure that a LVM will only work or deliver as fast as the slowest drive in the group... but I could be wrong. If I were in your shoes, I would save the cash from the SSD and just buy more RAM.
Well I already have the SSD, but guess I could sell it. It's not being gainfully employed, just sitting in a test box. The revenue from it could go towards a MB and RAM.
For now, I will keep researching and learning. My current physical HDA will suffice, but I do want to move to VM.
One more question. How do you handle the router with Proxmox and Amahi. I was thinking I could use DHCP on the router for 1 IP address (Proxmox) and then the Amahi VM would do DHCP for the network. Will that work or am I missing something.
Thanks again for your help! This is going to be a long learning and trial/error project for me it seems.