My current setup at home is two aging systems, one gaming PC that I usually put to sleep when not using and one 24hr server hidden away in a cupboard. Both are in need of an upgrade fairly shortly and I’m just wondering if a single system would be a viable option?
I’m not hosting THAT many services really. Most are just media related that would be unused when sat at the PC gaming as it’s just me that uses any of it. A strong enough CPU should be able to handle everything anything though shouldn’t it?
It seems like a good idea to me but I’m no expert. Is there anything obvious I’m missing?
I use an all in one. Linux host for hypervisor. Windows 11 with virtual tpm and gpu pass through for gaming, and a FreeBSD guest set up with 1 virtual hard disk, one ssd for boot mirror, and 3 2tb platter drives for file serving. At idle it takes about 80 watts (including the router hooked to the ups) per hour. Definitely more than a raspberry pi, but it really only burns 1-2 kWh a day which comes out to .30 a day for us (roughly).
The amount of time it would need to be running before it was cheaper to use a raspberry pi including everything it needs was almost 6 years of 24/7 uptime for our electric rate so to me it makes 0 sense to run this differently and separate. There are also more efficient at idle chips nowadays.
System specs: Ryzen 7 2800 8-core processor 128GB ram Gt 1030 video card for host 3060ti for windows vm 2 1 tb nvme drives 2 500GB ssd (one for boot, one for zfs cache FreeBSD) 3 2tb platter drives
Ah nice to see that it is actually feasible then. I imagine I’d have an even easier setup too as I intend to just use Linux with all my selfhosted software in Docker containers.
My server at the moment is anything but energy efficient. It’s an old Xenon (can’t remember the exact model) so definitely not Raspberry Pi levels of efficient. My biggest concern would be the GPU idling but it seems there are power management precautions I can take with Linux so maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
The 1030 uses a ridiculously small amount of power at idle for the server. The 3060ti is obviously a smaller card too but it only pulls ~15w at idle while the vm is running from my tests. It’s not the cheapest but 15w is not all that much of the 80 the server is pulling overall