When a Three-Node Proxmox Cluster Becomes a Small Data Center

It starts the way these things always do online. A screenshot. A spec list. A casual caption that dramatically undersells what's actually happening. "New cluster!" it says, with the digital equivalent of a shrug. Three nodes. Enterprise tag. A laughing emoji about RAM prices being out of control. No grand announcement. No marketing fluff. Just numbers on a screen. Then people look closer. Four and a half terabytes of memory. Hundreds of CPU threads. NVMe storage stacked like it's on clearance. Suddenly the comment section is no longer calm. It's disbelief, jokes, envy, flexes, and that familiar internet ritual where everyone tries to recalibrate their sense of scale. Someone drops "Holy Proxmox Jesus." Someone else realizes this cluster has more RAM than their entire household has owned across every device, ever. And that's when the tone shifts. This isn't a lab anymore. This is production gear. Serious gear. The kind of setup that blurs the line between "small business infrastructure" and "are you quietly running a data center out back?" Welcome to the moment where a three-node Proxmox cluster stopped being a neat screenshot and became a Rorschach test for how people think about modern compute. ## The Specs That Broke the Internet's Brain Let's get the raw numbers out of the way, because they're the reason everyone stopped scrolling. This cluster runs on three nodes, each powered by an AMD EPYC 9654P, a 96-core monster designed for exactly this kind of workload. Single socket, high core density, no nonsense. Multiply that across three machines and suddenly you're staring at close to 300 physical cores before hyperthreading even enters the conversation. Memory is where things go from "nice" to "what are you doing." Roughly 4.5TB of RAM across the cluster. Not storage. Not cache. Actual system memory. Enough to make even seasoned infrastructure folks pause and reread the screenshot just to be sure. Storage doesn't disappoint either. Each node is loaded with eight 2TB NVMe drives plus a couple of extra 1TB drives, clearly set up for performance-first workloads. This isn't bulk archival. This is "we want IOPS and we want them now." All of it tied together under Proxmox, the open-source virtualization platform that's become the go-to choice for people who want enterprise-grade features without vendor lock-in theatrics. On paper, it's clean. Balanced. Sensible, even. And yet the reaction was anything but calm. ## The Moment Everyone Realized This Wasn't a Homelab There's a cultural shorthand online for expensive compute. "Homelab" usually implies curiosity, learning, maybe a little excess if you're feeling spicy. But it still suggests limits. Spare parts. Last-generation hardware. A rack that lives in a garage or a closet and hums a little too loudly. This cluster shattered that assumption in seconds. People immediately clocked the RAM alone as enterprise territory. The core count sealed it. Suddenly the jokes weren't about what you could run. They were about what you shouldn't need to run. Minecraft servers. Pi-hole instances. Entire jokes about a single DNS container sipping from a firehose of memory. Then came the reality check. This wasn't a passion project. It was infrastructure for fully managed server hosting, largely focused on Windows virtual machines. Real customers. Real workloads. Real uptime expectations. Once that context landed, the tone shifted again. The envy stayed, but the disbelief turned into recognition. This wasn't excess for excess's sake. This was scale chosen deliberately. ## RAM Is Expensive, and Everyone Knows It One line in the original description hit harder than any spec list: RAM pricing is "hitting crazy." That wasn't a joke. Anyone who's priced enterprise memory in the last few years knows exactly what that means. CPUs have gotten denser. Storage has gotten faster and cheaper. Memory is the choke point. Always has been. Several commenters zeroed in on it immediately. The math is brutal. By the time you've specced multiple terabytes of ECC RAM, everything else starts to feel oddly affordable by comparison. CPUs feel reasonable. NVMe looks downright friendly. The memory bill is what keeps finance awake at night. And yet, the workloads demand it. Especially when you're running dense Windows VMs, customer isolation, and performance guarantees. Overcommit too aggressively and you'll feel it fast. Latency spikes. Complaints roll in. Support tickets start stacking. This cluster doesn't flirt with that line. It bulldozes past it. ## Three Nodes: Sensible or Playing It Close? If there's one technical critique that kept resurfacing, it was node count. Three nodes is the minimum viable cluster if you care about quorum and redundancy. It works. It's common. But it's also a little tense. Five nodes is where things start to feel comfortable. Maintenance windows get easier. Failures hurt less. Capacity planning stops being a white-knuckle exercise. The response was refreshingly grounded. Two more nodes are planned for 2026. This is phase one, not the final form. Build dense now, expand later. It's a strategy that makes sense when you're balancing capital costs, rack space, and growth projections. It also explains why each node is so loaded. Fewer machines, but each one is a heavyweight. ## The Flex Culture of Compute As soon as one impressive cluster appears online, it's only a matter of time before someone replies with "That's cute." And sure enough, someone did. Another user casually mentioned their environment: 25+ TB of RAM. Thousands of cores. Not a brag, just context. A reminder that once you step into enterprise territory, the scale warps quickly. What feels absurd to one group is baseline for another. What made this interesting wasn't the one-upmanship. It was the use case. A mix of hobby work and a cybersecurity learning environment for hundreds of students. Suddenly the numbers made sense again. Full network stacks per student. Multiple VMs. Isolated environments. Research workloads layered on top. At that scale, memory disappears fast. So do cores. The conversation quietly shifted from flexing to education. From "why would anyone need this" to "oh, right, that's why." ## Proxmox as the Quiet Enabler What's striking is how little debate there was about the platform itself. Proxmox didn't need defending. It didn't need hype. It was just… there. Doing the job. That says a lot. A decade ago, a cluster like this would almost automatically imply proprietary hypervisors, expensive licensing, and long procurement cycles. Today, open-source tooling has matured to the point where people are comfortable running serious production workloads without blinking. Features like clustering, high availability, ZFS, Ceph integration, and a clean web interface have turned Proxmox into something that feels boring in the best way. Predictable. Stable. Capable. When nobody argues about the hypervisor choice, you know the ecosystem has grown up. ## What This Says About Modern Infrastructure This cluster isn't notable just because it's big. It's notable because it's normal now. High core-count CPUs are expected. Terabytes of RAM are expensive but attainable. NVMe everywhere is the baseline, not the luxury tier. And small teams can deploy infrastructure that would have been unthinkable without a dedicated data center staff not that long ago. It also highlights how skewed perception can be. To one crowd, this is obscene overkill. To another, it's a reasonable starting point for hosting customers at scale. Both reactions are valid. They're just coming from different frames of reference. And that's the real story here. ## Not a Lab, Not Hypothetical, Very Real In the end, the most revealing part wasn't the specs or the jokes. It was the calm way the owner answered questions. What's it for? Managed hosting. Mostly Windows VMs. How are quotas handled? Thoughtfully. Plans for expansion? Already mapped out. No drama. No chest-thumping. Just infrastructure doing infrastructure things. That's how you know this isn't cosplay. It's not a benchmark flex. It's a working system designed to carry real load, serve real users, and grow over time. So yes, "Holy Proxmox Jesus" is a fair first reaction. But once the shock fades, what's left is something more interesting: a snapshot of how accessible serious compute has become, and how quickly the line between "too much" and "just enough" keeps moving. Three nodes. A few terabytes of RAM. And an internet moment that reminded everyone just how wild modern infrastructure can look when it's stripped of marketing gloss and dropped into a feed without warning.