I’m in the process of wiring a home before moving in and getting excited about running 10g from my server to the computer. Then I see 25g gear isn’t that much more expensive so I might was well run at least one fiber line. But what kind of three node ceph monster will it take to make use of any of this bandwidth (plus run all my Proxmox VMs and LXCs in HA) and how much heat will I have to deal with. What’s your experience with high speed homelab NAS builds and the electric bill shock that comes later? Epyc 7002 series looks perfect but seems to idle high.
5 node proxmox cluster (each node on 40gbps networking[yes ceph…], ~80TB of SSD storage, 180cores, ~630GB of ram total)
1 slow storage node (~400TB)
2x opnsense servers in HA
2x icx7750s
2x icx7450sPoE to all the things… and 8gbps internet.
Usually run ~15-17amps. So about 2000 watts. It’s my baby datacenter.
Sometime this month I’ll be installing 25000kwh solar system on my roof and batteries.
As far as heat goes… It’s in the garage with an insulated door, heat pump water heater, and there’s a tripplite ac unit in the bottom of the rack. The waste air(from the a/c) exhausts outside through a direct vent in the wall. The garage is downright tolerable to me for extended periods of time. The servers don’t complain at all.
Reading about all you guys being under 200w or whatever makes me wonder if it’s worth it. Then I realize that the cost to do even a 1/4 of what I do in the cloud is more expensive than buying my solar.
Power costs for the rack is about $100-120 a month. If it wasn’t for solar.
Edit: 75 LXC containers, 22VMs.
Damn that’s a setup alright!
If you’re making use of the hardware it’s well worth it over anything cloud based for sure.
Just out of curiosity, what do you use all that storage for?
On the Sata SSD ceph storage. That’s just live stuff on the containers/vms. I’m at 20% usage of the 70TiB usable at the moment. I don’t use it all that heavily. Because of the way ceph works it’s really ~23 TiB of usable space and ~4.5 TiB written since it writes 3 copies in my cluster.
On the slow storage node it’s running Truenas with 28 spinning disks at 16TB each. 2 hot spares, and 2 ssds each for cache, log, and metadata (eating up total of 36 bays). That’s 342.8TiB usable after raidz nonsense. And I’m 56% usage. I have literally everything I’ve done that I cared to save from like 2005 or 2006 or so. Backups for the ceph storage (PBS). Backups for computers I’ve had over the years. Lots of linux ISOs(105TiB) archived, including complete sets of gaming (37TiB) variants. Oh and my full steam library as well which currently sits at 14TiB. Flashpoint takes up a few TiB as well…
My pi costs probably around 20 a year lol.
125W (Less than $15/month) or so for
- Ryzen 9 3900X
- 64GB RAM
- 2x4TB NVMe (ZFS Mirror)
- 5x14TB HDD (ZFS RAID-Z2)
- 2.5GBe Network Card
- 5-port 2.5GBe Network Switch
- 5-port 1GBe POE Network Switch w/ one Reolink Camera attached
I generally leave
powerManagement.cpuFreqGovernor = "powersave"in my Nix config as well, which saves about 40W ($4/mo or so) for my typical load as best as I can tell, and I disable it if I’m doing bulk data processing on a time crunch.Around 100 Watts for
- NAS with 4x3.5" HDD,
- Minisforum HM90 for Proxmox with 2x2.5" HDDs,
- 16 Port TP Link PoE Switch,
- TP Link router
- 2x Raspberry Pi 4b
But everything with gigabit speed. Doesnt need more at home
My real server (Nextcloud/NAS/several more vm’s) uses 28 Watts on average. In addition, there is one Pi 4B running, and I don’t even know it’s wattage.
I’m planning on replacing the real server with a new one, with lots of cores and approx. 50 Watts then.
Pi4 tend to stick around 5w
5950x in an matx board with 15 x 3.5in drives 1 x sata sad 1 x optane u.2 drive (pulls like 10watts) 1 x Nvidia A2000 1 x Lsi 9305 16i 1 x 2.5gbe intel nic 3 x 140 mm fans at full tilt
Runs at like 120 watts at idle, like 220 watts with a good amount of work and peaks at like 320 watts if I make it do a lot of work
What in the world…
Dafuq you doing over there?
- Fujitsu motherboard
- Intel pentium G5600
- 6 HDD (4 x 4 TB 2 x 8 TB) spinned down
- 2 SSD for proxmox
- 6 CT and no VM for now
it runs at 16W mostly idle
15w Raspberry pi 4 + HDDs
I’ve got a 3 node Proxmox/ceph cluster with 10G, plus a separate Nas. They are all rack mount with dual PSU. Add in the necessary switching, and my average load is about 800w. Throw my desktop (also on 10G) into the mix and it runs 1.1kw.
That’s roughly $50-60 extra in electricity costs for me monthly.
Would be around 300€ in Germany, on a cheap contract. Limiting myself to one combined NAS/application server atm, with the others turned on only if I want to try sth out.
I’m afraid of dumping 500+ watts into a (air conditioned) closet. How are you able to saturate the 10g? I had some idea that ceph speed is that of the slowest drive, so even SATA SSDs won’t fill the bucket. I imagine this is due to file redundancy not parity/striping spreading the data. I’d like to stick to lower power consumer gear but ceph looks CPU, RAM, and bandwidth (storage and network) hungry plus low latency.
I ran proxmox/ceph over 1GB on e-waste mini PCs and it was… unreliable. Now my NAS is my HA storage but I’m not thrilled to beat up QLC NAND for hobby VMs.
My 10G is far from saturated, but I do try and keep things using RAM where possible. I figure that with 100gb of DDR4 in my main server, that should be able to provide enough speed for a 10G link.
I’ve got ceph running on Intel Enterprise SSDs, so they are pretty quick.
I also tried running ceph on 1G. I found it unreliable as well.
For my main server only… If HP iLO is to be believed, averaging around 130W.
Running: deluge, homarr, jellyfin, lidarr, navidrome, nextcloud, prowlarr, sonarr, whoogle and a minecraft server (VM) on TrueNAS Scale.
As for everything else (my router, switch and DNS/DHCP server, which is a separate machine, you can add another maybe 50W on top of it…
The last time I checked, mine runs at about 5-10 watts usually.
- Intel i7-3770
- 16gb DDR3
- 2 1TB SSDs
Are you sure. I was thinking those specs you would be more in the 50-80 watts range.
Yep, my homeserver spends most of it’s time idling, so power management kicks in.
Now when one of my build VMs are running, it’ll get up to that range, but that’s why I said it runs at 10 watts usually
You most likely won’t utilize these speeds in a home lab, but I understand why you want them. I do too. I settled for 2.5GBit because that was a sweet spot in terms of speed, cost and power draw. In total, I idle at about 60W for following systems:
- Lenovo M90q (i7 10700, 32GB, 3 x 1 TB SSD) running Proxmox, 15W idle
- Custom NAS (Ryzen 2400G, 16GB, 4x12TB HDD)v running Truenas (30W idle)
- Firewall (N5105, 8GB) running OPNsense (8W idle)
- FritzBox 6660 Cable, which functions as a glorified access point, 10W idle
With 25 GbE, even 10, I’d be tempted to PXE boot client systems. Maybe still have a local PCIe SSD for windows game files.
Dunno how that would actually work with Windows, but it was fun when I did it for beowulf nodes. Setting RPis to netboot is a little involved, but you can create an OSMC image and give all your TVs a consistent ‘smart’ interface. You don’t even need 10GbE to be pretty functional for the Pi, but my experience is that WiFi is not fast enough.
I’m running my smart home entirely from a single NUC running proxmox with VMs and LXCs for my services. It’s pulling ~7W on average
I have a small setup for some self hosted apps and media.
- Beelink Mini S.
- 2 external 5TB drives.
- A USB fan used as an exhaust because the SSD inside gets a bit warm.
I think total power is about 30W.
I have an ITX Ryzen 2700X with an arc A380. 3 HDDs and 1 SSD boot drive.
Before some kernel improvements for the A380, my idle wattage was 60W. Without the A380 it was around 35W idle. I am hoping that it is around 45W now because of fixing the high idle wattage of the GPU but I have to measure again.
Performance is great though. Perfect Jellyfin streaming, home automation, document and media management, file sync, recipe management, etc…
People tend to over-spec their servers, in my opinion. Unless you are dealing with more than a few dozen clients or so on one server (or having a many-user dedicated streaming server), you really don’t need much.
