Comment by minimaul | Hacker News Reader

Comment by minimaul | Hacker News Reader

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I also run a home VM server for several things, and you can do very very well with consumer hardware - and you don't need to go super high end.

One of the biggest disadvantages with using older enterprise hardware is that the power draw and noise can be substantially more than using up to date mid-range consumer hardware. There's not anywhere near as much well-priced second-hand hardware available outside of the USA, either.

I refreshed mine recently, and I went for an ASRock DeskMini H310 (not much bigger than NUC sized, but takes a full desktop processor), an i7 9700, 64GB of RAM, 2x 2TB SATA SSDs and a 1TB NVMe SSD. Runs Linux + KVM/qemu, is near silent, and overall works very very well - for a total cost of about £1200 incl VAT.

I'm not convinced it makes me directly more productive - really it's a hobby. But it's very useful for educational purposes - it teaches a lot of skills which are helpful professionally - especially if you work in smaller businesses and not FAANG.

On that. Highly recommend not using NUC, they get super noisy as soon as you have any load.

I would otherwise also use consumer hardware if it wasn’t for IPMI. Particularly if you are running an OS like windows which loves rebooting randomly and which updates often go wrong or take hours, if you don’t have a way to see what is happening while the server isn’t online, you end up walking a lot to the server with a screen. I think the sweet spot is a server MB (and therefore CPU) but everything else consumer.

I do understand this sentiment but I think it is waaaay over estimated by most people. I run a (mostly) full Windows environment and I've had to use a monitor/etc 2 times in the past 12 months, once after moving to a new apartment and standing things up and once after I replaced the boot drive in my NAS and moved to Server 2019 (ran the install and re-mounted disks with the PC on my desk). I've actually figured out that my old, PoS, Sentio SuperBook 'just works' with modern DisplayLink drivers on Linux or Windows so I have a tiny, battery powered screen/KB/mouse and USB port I can connect if needed.

I'm also not running any work or professional stuff, just Plex with array for storage, a Windows Domain (2x DCs), pihole in VM, and Ubuntu server for Unifi and stuff that works better on Linux. No websites or developer spaces though my uSFF hyperV box has free RAM if needed. Windows boxes prompt for updates once or twice a month as none of that is managed but reboots happen at 2am or so mid week and I don't have issues other than I overlaoded a J5005 ITX and it took maybe 20 minutes to reboot due to VMs taking forever to shut down. Now those are all on the uSFF box with a 6500T and it reboots in a few minutes even with updates.

The nice thing with using smaller hardware that is also super quiet is that you can just leave it on your desk - in this case the machine is on a secondary input to one of my monitors - a Dell that also has a built in USB switch, so changing the monitor input over also moves my keyboard and mouse over!

I'd go for a server motherboard if the machine was remote though - eg if it was going to sit in a cupboard, basement, etc. Remote media with a decent IPMI is a godsend for that.

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