Anyone else using Mac minis as VM hosts for self hosting? My Friendica server is a Linux VM on a Mac Mini in my living room. The VM is bound to a VLAN tagged network interface so it’s completely firewalled off from the rest of my network. Also got a second Linux VM on the same box for hosting local stuff on my main VLAN (HomeBridge/etc).

I feel like they’re really nice platforms for this, if not the cheapest. Cheaper than one might think though; I specced up an equivalent NUC and there wasn’t a lot of difference in price, and the M2 is really fast.

  • @[email protected]English
    16•1 year ago

    “I specced up an equivalent NUC and there wasn’t a lot of difference in price, and the M2 is really fast.”

    You must be putting a lot of stock in the CPU and 10G Ethernet. Because the pricing on storage and RAM, which are much more important resources in most self-hosting scenarios, differ an extreme amount since you can’t upgrade the RAM in the M-chip Minis. They also cap out at 32 GB which isn’t bad but half of what say AM4 can do. Power Efficiency is of course also great on the M-series chips which is worth something.

    If we’re purely talking Intel NUCs then the i7s and i9s do get expensive but so does the M2 pro. M2 is absolutely faster than i5 and i3 but I can’t really imagine a use case where that would matter for self-hosting?

    • @[email protected]English
      6•1 year ago

      AM4 can do 128 GB with 4 32 GB sticks.

      Other than that I agree with your post. No way you get more for your money as soon as you start going beyond the base configuration which is still 8 GB RAM /256 GB SSD in 2023/24 by the way.

      Sure, it’s a compact and very power efficient device and having 10 GbE built-in for a reasonable price uplift (decent PCIe 10 GbE cards aren’t much cheaper) is great. But to be honest an Intel NUC or even desktop parts with low-end motherboards aren’t exactly power suckers when mostly idle.

      And then SSD storage and RAM pricing is like a quarter compared to what Apple charges for it, if even that. And you have the choice of going for ECC RAM on supported platforms, which is great for a file server for example.

      OS compatibility is a big one as well, you can basically choose between macOS and Asahi Linux and while the latter is probably okay for self-hosting purposes, I prefer more stable and long-supported distros like Debian.