How to save power in a Homelab? 5 Tips!
Video Title: How to save power in a Homelab? 5 Tips!
If you’re into home Labs you probably know that it can be a costly hobby especially if you’re running many big machines the electricity Bild at the end of the year can explode very fast but of course at the same time you also want to run some useful stuff here and there
Though it can be quite a challenge to find out the best efficient way to do that and yes I’ve been there myself I’ve also made tons of mistakes in the past when I was building very big and power hungry machines in my home lab but just
Recently I made a couple of changes to reduce the overall power usage of my entire home lab to not waste too much energy and actually save some real money and in this video I’d like to share five tips with you based on my own experience and on the decisions that I’ve made and
Hopefully you will find them useful and you can Implement some of these tactics or tips in your setups as well so let’s jump right into it and let’s talk about how to effectively reduce the power usage in your home lab without shutting everything down so first of all I want to talk
About the elephant in the room here and that is picking the right hardware for your home lab especially if you are building your own computers or servers based on components from different manufacturers you need to find out so what type of CPU and mainboard combination you want to use for your
Build and which generation should that be should it be a latest AMD or Intel based CPU or should it be like like an older refurbished computer and I know a lot of people prefer buying older refurbished generations of professional server equipment networking components or computers because you can find some
Really great looking deals on eBay they look very promising you can get a lot of CPU cores tons of memory for very cheap money there but what you need to consider is that these older generations of Hardware components they were not usually created with power efficiency in
Mind and of course a lot of improvements and a lot of development has been done in the recent years in power efficiency especially in CPUs when you take a look at the C stat so these are low power modes as CPU can get in and this especially becomes relevant in a home
Lab situation because what you need to consider is when you for example compare a homeab workload like a server workload with a gaming PC for example you can definitely tell like a gaming PC see when you’re playing games that utilizes most of the CPU power or the graphics
Unit to calculate render and those kind of things but if you compare that to a h lab server workloads where we are just running a web server or where we are running a data storage something like that most of the time in a home lab a CPU doesn’t really need to compute
Anything yeah it’s just mostly sitting there and idle waiting for requests then sending back their requests shortly and then again turning into the next idle mode modern generation CPUs really make a huge difference here for example I can tell you from my own experience I once
Bought a Dell power Edge t410 which is like the like 10 or maybe 15 years old I really don’t know but that is a small Tower server that is based on professional server equipment and that is what I used for my very first home lab server built but when I compared the
Power usage of that particular server with the power usage of my desktop PC that I used for gaming I could find out that in idle mode the Dell power Edge actually consumed three times the power consumption of my desktop PC so that’s why I got rid of this old machine and
Turned my old desktop computer or my gaming PC into my new Home Server so maybe you don’t need to always get the latest generation of Hardware components of course but maybe look out for some desktop CPUs maybe the second old generation of Intel or AMD CPUs or what
You can also do is when you want to build the most efficient home lab ever you probably should look out for buying some mini computers you can get some really great refurbished mini computers on eBay that don’t really cost a lot of money but still offer you some decent
Amount of computing power because these mini computers are really created with power efficiency in mind so they are usually not consuming so much power than a regular desktop PC or desktop CPU that will make your home lab so much more efficient than investing some money on professional server equipment so that’s
What I can definitely tell you from my own experience the second tip I want to give you is also a great way to save some power in a home lab and that is by using the hardware resources that you just bought in the best efficient way and uh that probably shouldn’t surprise
Most of you guys because you might be very familiar with it but I think it definitely should be on this list here and that is running virtu machines or using virtualization because if you want to run a couple of servers in your home lab to experiment maybe a Linux server also
A second Linux drro or a Nas or something like that instead of buying a second or third computer to run these kind of operating systems in your home lab just put them on one single server and use virtualization because that allows you to run multiple operating systems and separating workloads from
Each other and I would also recommend that to everybody who just needs one server because you might just need one server for now but I definitely can tell you if you are into home laabs and experimenting you often change things around you might try out a different Linux distribution deploy another server
And so on and if you now need to buy a second computer or turn a second old desktop computer into a new home server or maybe a third a fourth that really doesn’t make any sense so always use a hypervisor operating system and put it
On a Home Server I by the way recently made a video about what is the Best Home Server operating system and I came to the conclusion that either proxo which is a great hypervisor platform to run virtual machines on a Linux based operating system or tress scale which is
Also based on Linux but is more like a Nas solution these two options are probably the best that I can recommend to you so that gives you a great Foundation a great place to getting started with home labing but it also makes sure that you have already implemented the right infrastructure to
Expand this in the future for example both operating systems TR scale and prox MOX they allow horizontal scaling of adding more Computing nodes so if your home Labs grows bigger and you actually need more Hardware resources or more computing power but you can still do that in an efficient way especially if
You combine that with the right Hardware components then you can still form a bigger cluster but still have a very low power usage so running a hypervisor as your main operating system is probably the best way to get started in home lab that gives you all the foundation to
Experiment and use your Hardware resources in the best efficient way but also has a great opportunity to expand your home lab in the future if you really need to go bigger the third tip I want to give you is turn off your servers when you don’t need them and I
Know this might sound very obvious because yeah of course servers that don’t run they don’t consume power that’s nothing I need to explain to you but this is definitely a topic that is so often overlooked by people and I know this because we as it guys we tend to
Run most of our workloads 24/7 because that’s what we are used to do in a professional environment yeah like company servers and services they of course need to run 24/7 but if you actually start thinking about if that’s really the case for a home lab you might
Come to the conclusion that in a h lab situation most of the services actually don’t need to run 24/7 yeah I agree that there are some services that you might want to run 24/7 like for example a DHCP server DNS or internet access firewalls but you can definitely think about if
The kubernetes cluster that you mainly use for experimenting deploying monitoring workloads or your personal n storage where you accessing files for work or video creation projects whatever that probably does not need to run especially at night when you’re sleeping and you can’t do anything and this is also where virtualization helps you a
Lot because I recently made the decision to separate some of my workloads to more power efficient machines so for example I I use a small mini computer where I’m running a couple of workloads like DNS or home assistant for my iot and smart home stuff so this is something that I
Always need 24/7 available but I’ve also put a lot of the components on my bigger servers where I’m running proxmox and this is where I usually tend to shut down all the services that I don’t need and shutting down servers also makes a difference for virtual machines this is
Something that probably not so many people know but every virtual machine that runs on a hypervisor will also utilize a couple of resources like CPU time or some memory and when you shut down virtual machines it actually makes a real difference in the power consumption I compared the power
Consumption when every virtual machine was running to some of the virtual machines that from my test kubernetes clusters and so on that I shut down and the difference was probably around like 5 or 10% of the power usage so this really makes a huge difference if you don’t need your testing vual machines
Shut them down and of course the same is more than ever true for any physical machine that you can shut down when you don’t need it so that will probably make the most difference in terms of money and it’s really something that is so easy to implement because shutting down
Servers that really takes like a few seconds yeah to run a remote command and by the way if you want to wake up your servers you want to wake up your physical machines from remote I recently made a video about Wake On last so this allows you to remotely wake up your
Servers also by simply pressing a button on your phone so I recently made a video about that if you’re interested in Wake On L check out this video that’s by the way the whole reason why I made it because I wanted to save power in my
Home lab really the best tip that I can give you now we are getting to the more complex stuff I would say the fourth tip that I want to give you is be very careful when building a starch server and don’t go too big a couple of months
Ago I built a very big starge server I made an entire video about that explaining how to install Tres scale and explaining some of the hardware components that I used for this build but if you now take a look you can see that this torch server is currently
Lying under my couch because I don’t use it anymore it wasted too much energy and I actually didn’t need that big star server so it’s kind of sad that I got rid of it but actually I think it was the right decision and what I’ve learned
From this project I want to explain to you now in a bit more detail firstly I completely underestimated how much power one single magnetic hard drive consumes even when it’s on idle even when it’s not doing anything and I measured the power consumption of my big storage
Server with 12 hard drives compared to when it was empty and what I found out is that one hard drive nearly consumes about 5 watts and this is really crazy if you think about it this is actually the same that a raspberry PW consume so when you’re running a big storage server
With 12 hard drives that’s the same like running 12 raspberry pies in a cluster absolutely insane so what I definitely will do in the future is I would definitely consider buying bigger hard drives but fewer of them and not build such a big storage pool where you are
Also wasting too many of your hard drives for redund y for example I’ve built a striped rate Z2 storage pool of 12 hard drives so that means like eight hard drives I’m using for storage the other four hard drives are completely wasted just for redundancy but they also
Consuming power I now think it would be so much smarter to just put like three or maximum of four hard drives in a raid Z1 storage pool because if you’re putting like three 12 TB hard drives in a raate Z1 storage pool you you have the storage capacity of 24 terab but you
Only have the power consumption of three hard drives in comparison to 12 so that makes a huge difference it might be a bit slower but magnetic hard drives aren’t the fastest hard drives anyways you probably should better invest in more memor so that you have more cash
For providing a fast storage pool or you can also think about like adding an nvme or an SSD so use them as a cash volume or as a second fast storage pool that makes much more sense and of course you also don’t need to invest too much money into buying additional storage
Controllers that you need if you need to put in so many hard drives together it’s a bit sad that I needed to get rid of it but ultimately it was a great learning experience that costs a shitload of money but hey I’ve learned something and
The last tip that I want to give you and this is also based on my experience on this star server project and that is every Hardware component consumer power I know also kind of obvious but this is also something that is often underestimated because I need to remind
You about the Cates I just talked about in the beginning of this video so the C the low power modes of this CPU and this is especially an interesting topic when you’re thinking about pcie extension cards because what most people don’t know is especially older pcie extension
Cards they consume of course some amount of power usage themselves but what I also found out during my experim experiments is that if you using two older Hardware components on your server build that also sometimes prevents higher C state so for example with my storage uh server when I plugged in the
Storage controller so then my CPU only was able to go into cstate one which is yeah a really low cstate and that is nearly c0 where CPU was 100% awake and this is just because the PCI controller card that I was using was too old it didn’t support this low power state of
The CPU and this is especially a problem if you’re thinking about adding more hard drives into an N or you’re investing into a SATA controller or an HBA or something like that or if you’re running 10 GB ethernet cards so I’ve measured the power consumption on my
Server component when the PC card was plugged in and that actually made a difference of like 10 or 15 watts so really crazy if you think about like a raspberry pie consumes around about five Watts it’s like three raspberry pies just for running this 10 gab ethernet
Cards and then you need to really think about do you actually need this or can you save some power and just get rid of 10 GB so you can see that it can become quite difficult uh to actually build a power efficient home map especially if you’re investing into some additional
Components like 10 gbit storage controllers and you also should really think carefully about what you can get rid of to just bring down the cost in your home lab save some money but still provide some useful workloads do your experiments with virtual machines so I
Hope this was a bit inspiring to you I know this is a very complicated topic and I could go on forever but I think these were the most crucial things you should consider when buying Hardware components building home labs and yeah doing this amazing hobby that we all
Share by the way if you want to support my work um just make sure to hit the like button subscribe and if you want to show your appreciation and financially support me you can also sign up on patreon thanks to all the supporters on patreon you guys are just amazing thanks
For watching and I will catch you in the next video take care bye-bye
Video Keywords: Operating Systems & Servers
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I was planning to pickup a used Dell Poweredge R720 with 256GB of ram a few days ago. I had to reschedule. After watching your presentation I am definitely re-thinking my approach. Thank you
My docker host is an older NUC (i3-6100U) that draws 4.x W at idle.
I also have a 4x2TB DIY NAS (25-40W idle), that is only used for backups. Since that backup machine is not needed 24/7, it starts via RTC schedule, runs all the backup job and shuts down again.
sehr nice! Danke dir! Grüße aus Österreich 🇦🇹
Saving money is the big thing. I built my storage and VM as best as I could. My main NAS is a truenas setup running on a Xeon Bronze 3204 CPU with 12 HDDs which are in 3 pools. My backups run in the night, so powering down is not an option. Also starting up and shutting down would cause a lot of wear and tear on the system. I have my main Proxmox running on a desktop MB with 64GB of RAM and Ryzen 5950X CPU and a 2nd Proxmox system running on a older Micro HP G3 800 computer. My backup NAS is powered by an Atom based MB also running TrueNAS. I lastly have another TrueNAS system which is my off-line archive. It get connected to power and network only when I backup to it and then turned off and disconnected. Will have to look into what settings I can tweak on my NAS system to save some power. Besides all the regular data on the NAS, I have my movies, TV show and music collection. Would love to have SSDs instead, but the sizes I require are not available yet and even if they were, I could not afford it.
I too use my gaming computer (that I don't game on) as a server (AMD Threadripper 2950X 16 core, 32 threads, 64 GB of RAM, NVIDIA 3090, and 80 TB of RAID 6 storage on a Corsair AX 1600i). I run Arco Linux and host my Plex and file server on it. My computer has WOL on and enabled in the BIOS. The dual monitors are set to sleep when not in use. I have a Raspberry Pi that functions for Pi-Hole, Unbound, NOIP DUC, Etherwake, and Tailscale exit node. On my Android phone, I have Tailscale set to always on VPN and I use an app called Tasker that sends an SSH command to the Pi which then sends the Etherwake packet to the computer and wakes it up when I want to use it. This works great for me and is way more power efficient than it used to be.
Some of my thoughts on building my homelab.
1. Raspberry Pi's are great but storage for constant writing burn out quick with POE Hats sure but not dependable. Mini pcs are great but doing RAID may not be possible and also ECC memory may not be possible. Or Dual NIC for Network Bonding unless you have USB connections.
2. RESEARCH RESEARCH RESEARCH. Know your limits and where you want to go and keep a bit of open room to improve on.
3. I have 2 computers that are rackmounted as my servers running 24/7 well 3 if you include the NVR Security Cameras. One is VM for FIrewall, Windows Server DHCP, Pi Hole. The other is my NAS with Docker and many services running on it.
4. When building out I try to keep the CPU wattage under 65watts. AMD 5600x seems to be great for this task. Many over build a and barely use it. Be realistic, plan ahead but not where you have to rebuy new equipment
5. Do not buy refurb Rackmount Servers from network rooms. The noise level is loud and when you turn them out its sounds like a plane taking off. During the summer its gets hot during winter its a heater. My 2 servers maintain the room luke warm at best during summer and winter i don't notice them or noise.
there always gotta be paradox on finish compute faster and rest early versus just do lazier compute on old 2nd hand cheaper peace of crape that save money now
дякую
NUCs are quite good for power consuption
Great video. But I should say that first advice should be that always think about what use case you build your server for, for light load your advice is exelent, in my case for example it should be expensive and waste time. My home server can often have full load for days, use them as render farm for blender and other 3D applications. Then old (5 years or so) is most efficient
@christian Thank you for the video. I think the best option is to go virtual.
The best way of "saving energy" for me is to buy and install 4 windmills and solar panels with the appropiate bank of Energy. Depending on the size that could save a LOT of energy not just for all my hardware stuff, but for the full home for several years. Is an investment.
The exception on the modern cpu lower power is the 13th gen intel. Power usage went through the roof…
14 gen improvement was to start lowering that power usage again
I'm using a Ryzen 5 5600G in my Proxmox host. I have 14 VMs (1x Windows Server, 1x HomeAssistant OS, 12x Debian) running 24/7 and my server only has a power consummption of 40-50W/h. (it can go up to 60W when backing up my VMs). That is about 8-15€ per month here in Germany.
This is very important especially in Germany. I currently pay 32 €ct/kWh! 🤮
my TrueNas server consumes approx. 20W more with a 10Gbit card than without… that's almost 50% of the idel consumption.
Thank you 🙏 this video is amazing!!
It is almost unfair whenever I see US youtubers building homeservers. They are almost always totally overkill or don't show any considerations for power consumotion. Most of the servers in those videos would cost me several thousand dollars of power here in central Europe if I would run them for their expected lifespan.
It is nice to see a competent youtuber who considers or even prioritises power consumption.
I have 2 servers, one cheap but very modern one, this is my 24/7 server with my mailserver, password manager, vpn, etc. etc. and another server that was quite expensive, is old+used but is really powerful in comparison (8 cores in my 24/7 server vs. 28 cores in my big server)
The 24/7 server uses ~40W constantly, and the big server uses ~140W at full idle. Since the big server used to house my NAS, this was kind of a problem. Eventually I stumbled across some new 12TB HDDs that Hetzner is selling on ebay for ridiculously little money, so I threw 4 of these into my 24/7 server for a raidz1, and I couldn't be happier
tip 6: don't use ZFS
Keep it up man, love your channel for this topic, saving money and power, welcome back looking good