I run nearly everything off a single 10th gen Celeron with #unraid. I've probably got about 10 docker containers running constantly plus MariaDB and a bunch that I use periodically (like Handbrake, MKVtoolnix, etc). It will run a single VM alright for playing around, though that maxes out my ram and trying to run SQL Server on a Windows Server VM was just too much.

My real concern is power draw, and all told, my system idles around 18w and maxes out around 45w when encoding/transcoding

I've been starting to consolidate my home lab (two boxes under the stairs), and force myself to move to an IaC solution.

I settled on systemd-nspawn containers, instead of something docker based (I needed persistent OS containers, not ephemerial applications that disappear when shutdown).

My OS of choice is Gentoo (but I have friends who do something similar on Debian and Nix), and try to make sure that everything is handled by the OS package manager wherever possible.

This lets me create individual "profiles" for each of my hosts, which depends on a list of packages to install. Non-generic / site-specific config files are handled this way too; whereby I make a custom package for config files, and "install" them from the package manager, rather than using an out-of-band solution like ansible.

1 physical machine running proxmox. A FreeBSD VM hosting a few jails. 2-3 other linux VMs for a few services I keep up all the time.

If I want to experiment, I do so in a new VM/Container/FreeBSD Jail.

@teajaygrey this is what I do. I have a TrueNAS on a HP small form factor desktop PC from like 2013 that I modified to hold three HDDs and added more fans to. I can run bhyve, but I am satisfied with TrueNAS plugins.

I currently run Deluge and Plex but was running Graylog as well. Problem with Graylog is I don’t really have enough RAM to run it with good enough query performance. It takes DDR3, and I could max it out, but meh. It’s fine for everything else.

@ZiggyTheHamster @teajaygrey
Sounds good 🙂
How did you modify it to hold more HDD's? Curious 🙂

Graylog is something I wanna try 🙂

@mc
A #NAS is also what I have here. I don't have much data - but it is convenient 😉

Ah, a VPS.... there is a todo somewhere about that 😎

@teajaygrey the onboard Intel GPU supports hardware accelerated encoding/decoding, and poking that into Plex was easy enough. I also have TrueNAS configured to enable powerd and scale the CPU performance down when idle. I haven’t measured it, but power consumption seems to be <80W at idle.

Oh and I have a couple of NVMes in there for log/L2ARC.

@teajaygrey basically I just Dremeled out clearance for the connectors and stuff and put it in the top part of the drive caddy thing the case has.

Here’s some photos. The first is pre mod, the second shows the third drive I hacked in (with a fan), and the third one shows how everything is plumbed (there’s another drive hiding out if you look; total of 3).