proxmox
Mini Homelab Tour – I do a LOT with this Little Proxmox Server
Mini Homelab Tour – I do a LOT with this Little Proxmox Server and 100+ Docker Apps
#Mini #Homelab #Tour #LOT #Proxmox #Server
“SmartHomeBeginner”
Why pay hundreds or thousands in electricity and hardware costs just to run a homelab server?
I keep it simple and run a Minilab. My homeserver only consumes about 22 Watts on average. But it runs a lot of virtual machines, LXC containers, and over 50 services as Docker containers.
Mini PC…
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Thanks for the demo and info, wow, you're setup is awesome. Have a great day
Four things:
1) Very nice video, guides, and github repo. Thank you for sharing.
2) I see on your Github repo that you have Firefox running as a Docker container. However, when I ran a search on your site for "firefox", there is no mention of it.
What is the relative advantage of running Firefox via a Docker container over running it as a conventional app either via a LXC container or via a VM?
3) Your 22 W is only when everything is idle, correct? What's the power consumption when everything is running, at full load (e.g. when your Plex Media Server is doing the initial scan of the media files and indexing them)?
4) I now have two instances of Photoprism running on my home lab server, where it is indexing somewhere around 4 million+ pictures. So that's pushing my server's load average up to around 120 (that's how high it was when I left this morning). As a result of that, that's pushing my power consumption up to around the 670 W mark. I'll know what my idle power consumption is going to be, when the indexing is complete. Running a 36-bay, dual Xeon server, I don't think that I've seen my system idle at < 550 W.
That's pretty close to what I have going right now (PI, Nuc, NAS). Unfortunately i'm predicting that I will be better off upgrading to a full system (with a power efficient cpu) with everything combined, and spinning down drives to save power. That way I can adjust the specs as I see fit, usb is also pretty slow for the external drives.
That's a lot of sprawl and power use:
Docker?! Insecure, obsolete
Proxmox?! Bloat, unnecessary
Raspberry Pi?! Slow, unnecessary
Digital Ocean?! Expensive, unnecessary
Synology?! Unreliable, proprietary
You could do all that and more in a single box:
Linux bare metal, OCI free tier, and Podman… it's the only way to fly.
I'm also focused on low power and space in my home lab. I built a miniature server rack consisting of 8 Raspberry Pi 4 computers, running tasks such as DHCP, Active Directory, DNS, files, VPN, Ansible, and Nagios,. All run Ubuntu, even the AD domain controllers. The mini rack includes two Gbit switches running from USB power, and the whole rack is powered by a single 10 port USB charger, with a single power cord. Then I have two desktops running Proxmox, each with 64 GB RAM, quad core i7, and NVME drives. For storage, both servers have a 6 drive ZFS array of SATA SSDs in hot-swap trays, and both arrays are shared datastores with NFS, on a 10 Gbit connection. The Proxmox servers host around 20 Linux and Windows VMs. Powerful and fast lab, with low power requirements.