A Raspberry Pi is not enough and a dedicated server too much? This post shows a system balancing power consumption and performance.
As you can guess, I am using many different services during my day. Most of them are self hosted and running on an on-premise hardware at my home. In the past there was no problem using some servers and hosting them in a rack in the basement, but our new flat has no basement. So I need to change something. This post describes the journey to "the new world".
At the moment I am using two servers with ESXi and pretty nice hardware like XEON cpus. Most of my services have their own virtual machine and communicate via the virtual switches. Basically it works fine and I do like the credo "never touch a running system"...but as you know, I am responsible for industrial cloud applications and their development. So this setup feels a bit old fashioned and seems to need a retrofit. An additional arguement is the energy consumption: 44 Wh at 24/7 results in 385 kWh per Year per server. So we are in 2019 and we should have an eye on our environment. As long as energy is not 100 % green we should try to save as much as we can.
So what are my targets for this project?
First step is the selection of the hardware with a good price-performance-ratio. First idea was to get an AMD-system with a Ryzen APU or CPU but all the benchmarks showed that the complete system consumes a lot more than 15 Wh. So they are not in my scope for now. Then I recognized the Celeron series from Intel. Some benchmarks show a power consumption of ~ 10 Wh. But there is also one downside here: The J5005 is not in stock in the complete EU. So i have to go for the ASRock J4105-ITX. Specifications state that the board is limited to 8 GB of RAM. After some research I found out that it is only tested with this amount of RAM, so I decided to give it a try with 16 gigabytes. (2 packages of G.Skill RipJaws F4-2133C15S-8GRS) Due to the target to reduce power consumption I bought a Mini-ITX PSU (120W) combined with a 120W power supply. This one is way more effective than the normal ATX PSUs. But keep the limitation of the wattage in mind! My operating system boots from an external SSD with an USB3.0 adapter. This gives us the possibility to use the SATA controllers (Yes, I did not make a mistake! There are two controllers on the board!) for virtual machines via PCI-passthrough. You may remember the introduction and the mentioned missing basement. This limitation in positioning possibilities resulted in a new case.