Even better: buy an old office desktop from about 10 years ago, upgrade the ram and storage (if you feel like it) and install Proxmox. Now you can run as many servers as you want, faster, probably cheaper, and with much less hardware.
It would be worth measuring the power usage/efficiency. I run a home server that runs quite a few things on it and the power usage is around 225 watts at idle. At my electric rates, that amounts to around $45/month in electricity alone.
225 watts is a bit high for most small servers, but mine seems to be rather high due to the fact that I have about 18 SATA HDDs connected to it for file server capabilities.
A Raspberry Pi 4 consumes around 5 watts running at full bore, 2-3W at idle. Of course, it also couldn't handle what I am doing or I would use it.
In fact, my Home Assistant is running on a small mini-itx Intel celeron box dedicated to that because the PI was a bit too slow for my needs. But I run quite a bit of automation stuff on my Home Assistant instance. It draws around 25 watts at idle.
Pre-pandemic, I picked up a fanless NUC style computer for ~$200. Takes a SSD and runs under 15 watts. I do not know if that pricing is still attainable today, but is my recommendation for someone looking for a tiny home server.
Probably better power use than a bunch of PIs, but no, not than one or two, and not quieter. The one I bought is basically silent, though, with the stock cooler. Just hard to compete with fanless.
This is exactly what I did. I have an HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Mini sitting on a shelf in my basement running HomeAssistant and a stack of other software that the technology in my house more or less relies on.
I went halfway to creating a VM for MacOS, but apparently if you sign in to anything in that state, you can get your account closed. :/
Could be great as a test/dev box though.
EDIT: Just run Portainer in an unprivileged LXC container. That's what I do. Isolation, native performance, plus a point-and click web manager for Docker containers. It's absolutely delightful!
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Even better: buy an old office desktop from about 10 years ago, upgrade the ram and storage (if you feel like it) and install Proxmox. Now you can run as many servers as you want, faster, probably cheaper, and with much less hardware.
It would be worth measuring the power usage/efficiency. I run a home server that runs quite a few things on it and the power usage is around 225 watts at idle. At my electric rates, that amounts to around $45/month in electricity alone.
225 watts is a bit high for most small servers, but mine seems to be rather high due to the fact that I have about 18 SATA HDDs connected to it for file server capabilities.
A Raspberry Pi 4 consumes around 5 watts running at full bore, 2-3W at idle. Of course, it also couldn't handle what I am doing or I would use it.
In fact, my Home Assistant is running on a small mini-itx Intel celeron box dedicated to that because the PI was a bit too slow for my needs. But I run quite a bit of automation stuff on my Home Assistant instance. It draws around 25 watts at idle.
Pre-pandemic, I picked up a fanless NUC style computer for ~$200. Takes a SSD and runs under 15 watts. I do not know if that pricing is still attainable today, but is my recommendation for someone looking for a tiny home server.
Quieter and better power efficiency too?
Probably better power use than a bunch of PIs, but no, not than one or two, and not quieter. The one I bought is basically silent, though, with the stock cooler. Just hard to compete with fanless.
I thought RPis were extremely power efficient. Is that wrong?
They only draw about 5 watts under heavy usage, 2-3w at idle. Though I'm not sure how that compares on a watt per CPU cycle comparison.
Sometimes it's not about power efficiency, but repurposing hardware you already have instead of buying new.
This is exactly what I did. I have an HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Mini sitting on a shelf in my basement running HomeAssistant and a stack of other software that the technology in my house more or less relies on.
I did this too and it's nice.
I have a vm for macos. I have containers for git, dav, nextcloud, etc.
only thing I would love is something like docker to build containers from one dockerfile.
I went halfway to creating a VM for MacOS, but apparently if you sign in to anything in that state, you can get your account closed. :/
Could be great as a test/dev box though.
EDIT: Just run Portainer in an unprivileged LXC container. That's what I do. Isolation, native performance, plus a point-and click web manager for Docker containers. It's absolutely delightful!
What can you do with Proxmox that you can't do with `kubectl apply -f blah-pod.yaml` or whatever?
Proxmox supports virtual machines and is a web-based frontend to KVM/QEMU.
Kubernetes is a scheduler for containerized workloads.
Kubernetes can have a web-based frontend and the pods it can run are similar to virtual machines, no?