proxmox
Saving Power in my Homelab with Auto-Shutdown for Proxmox Backup
Saving Power in my Homelab with Auto-Shutdown for Proxmox Backup Server
#Saving #Power #Homelab #AutoShutdown #Proxmox #Backup
“apalrd’s adventures”
Today I’m trying to reduce the power consumption of my [Proxmox Backup Server](/posts/2023/pbs_intro/). The HP Microserver is great for what I need, but it’s kinda loud and I’m working on optimizing my power bill. The homelab is the largest single consumer of electricity aside from the air…
source
To see the full content, share this page by clicking one of the buttons below |
Cheers for the video, the task list idea might make its way into my solution.
Currently i use home assistant to power on a wifi plug, once the power goes on the server automatically boots up (i forget the bios option for this but basically if theres power, its on, all be it after a 2 mins sleep). Shutting down its a bit janky it works out if its shut down and then turns then plug off at the mains.
My secondary machine on which I run second PBS takes only 8W while idle (MinisForum Venus UM773) that as per UK prices gives me in total cost of 20 GBP/year – probably no need to turn in off and on and bring more exposure to failure due to power on/off. But the idea is great and makes sense if your PBS consumes too much power.
Russian propaganda t-shirt during war? Nice! Maybe next day you can wear one with Hitler, Stalin or a swastika?
лайка, откуда такая майка?
Great video and thanks for sharing it! It just arrived on time since I did something similar finished today. In my case I end up configuring a nodered flow to perform backups sequentially and controlled from my 3 servers (wanted to avoid doing backup of a server while asynchronously start garbage collection or a remote sync which impacts a lot the performance just by guessing this will take 30 min and other task 40 etc…). To avoid that, I run one backup at a time and check the task created for that backup. Once finished jump to the next… once all finished sync job (which is very unpredictable in terms of when will be finish) and finally prune + garbage. This approach helps to keep everything under control and one thing at a time for performance reason. I was worry to play with expected timings that sometimes screw up everything :S
uhh, fetching the running task list is really cool!
what I do for some of my systems is have them plugged into a smart outlet which completely cuts power once there's less than 5W of power draw (system is off)
then, to boot it back up, I've got power loss recovery set to "always on" in the bios and just turn on the outlet
I don't have ipmi on anything so this is a great way to squeeze out the last couple of watts when the system is off
i say leave it on all the time – goto a mobile tiger lake platform? good point about enterprise gear people get these big systems and then they get the power surprise but if you use a system basically all the time just leave it on – if you serve via r proxy you sort of have to; also this vid points to trend of consolidation – instead of 5-6 boxes try to run a couple boxes both with ups and running at optimal efficiency – save enough in a few years to make a difference #shelly relays
Its quite similar to what I got. only shutdown is just a hard shutdown no checking if any tasks are still running. time to change that! Thanks man
This is solid. I'm curious to hear your thoughts about running a server off a thumb drive / sdcard like you mentioned.
I appreciate the vulnerability in your message. It takes courage to share such a personal vision, and it's truly moving.
Neat!
Thanks a lot for your videos 🙂
I run Proxmox on refurbished Dell Optiplex (Intel i3, i5) and Acer/Asus Chromebox (Intel i7) SFF desktops. With a little bit of kernel command line magic you can dynamically drop the CPU to 400MHz when idle, this saves quite a bit of power.
If booting on ZFS root:
edit the /etc/kernel/cmdline file and append
cpufreq.default_governor=powersave
to the end of the kernel boot command line. Then run
proxmox-boot-tool refresh
to updated the bootloader and reboot Proxmox to take effect.
After rebooting, you can run the below to verify the realtime CPU frequency:
watch -n .5 grep MHz /proc/cpuinfo
I used to turn off my NAS and Proxmox at night, like 11:30 pm – I'm usually in bed by 11 anyway. And my Ras Pi had a backup Pihole and a Wake on Lan script and it worked great.
But the problem is you lose your ARC cache on Truenas. SO i just host proxmox always on stuff on a Micro PC that uses like 10 watts at idle most of the time.
Is there an opportunity to use anacron, so you don't have to worry excessively of the server has made it back online in time for a particular time trigger?
I am using WOL from HomeAssistant to wake up the PBS but for shutdown your script is nice and I will use also . Thanks
This is a useful topic and good ideas! Aligning it to your off peak power is great.
Yes, this is the thing I was looking for! Thanks for the vid!
I learn so much from your videos. Thank you!
To enable WOL for low cost offbaord-NICs (RTL8125, etc) it might be needed to run something like "ethtool -s enp2s0 wol g" once per boot for the card to keep the port up after shutdown.
Thanks for the video!
Are you worried about the increased wear on your backup drives booting up and shutting down once per day?
It sort of sounds to me like the better option here would be to use one of those fancy mains power backup units (jackery?) or whatever flavour of the week, then put a relay on it to only charge the battery from mains when its on off-peak power hours 🙂
In my case I have truenas scale on an older desktop in the basement and I just looked into the cpu speedstep stuff to make sure it runs the cpu as slow as possible when there is no load.
Took a bunch of googling to find the commands and I already forgot how i did it now 🙁
Don't most motherboard support wake from RTC in the bios ?