Low power home office server hardware

Shaun Sheppard · 17 Jan 2019 at 11:40

I'm a software developer working from home, last year I purchased a second hand HP xw8600 workstation to use as a development server. Specs are 2 x Quad Core Xeons, 32GB RAM and a couple of 5400 Sata Drives. It's running XenServer which allows me to create individual VM's for any projects I'm working on.

In a bid to track down our homes high energy consumption, I've fitted smart sockets to various sockets in my home office, and I've found that the server idles at around 270w constantly, with an estimate usage of 2,500 kwh per year, costing roughly £350 per year.

What I'd like to do, is purchase or build a low powered system which would reduce energy costs, and use the savings to offset the cost of the build, whilst still having enough power to handle XenServer and various VM's.

I currently have a couple of HP Microservers (NL36), and they're great little things, use next to no power, but frankly, are not powerful enough for my needs.

So I think what I'm looking for, is something mid-way between the HP Microserver I have, and the HP workstation. The problem is, I'm not 100% sure what the best option is.

One option is an AMD Athlon 2200G, which has a TDP between 46-65w, 32GB RAM and a 400w power supply, but ideally I think I'm looking for something with a 35w TDP or lower.

I don't need RAID capabilities, as nothing on the server is mission critical and couldn't be restored easily.

Any advice that can be provided on a potential solution would be great.

Shaun Sheppard · 17 Jan 2019 at 13:58

I've put together the following system that I 'think' might meet my needs;

AMD Ryzen 5 2600 (65w TDP)
Gigabyte B450M Motherboard
32GB DDR 4 2400Mhz
Cooler Master Q300l
EVGA 450 w B3 80+ Bronze PSU
2 x 1TB 5400 SATA Drives

Does anyone have any idea what power draw this might have at Idle (without monitor). To reduce consumption I could drop to a Ryzen 5 2400G (46-65w TDP), or even an A10-9700E (35w).

mikedigitales · 17 Jan 2019 at 14:34

Would it be worth going for a gold or above PSU to save a little if it's an always on machine? The saving is probably small, bit you'd also be getting a better unit with a much longer warranty. Something like an EVGA G2 or G3 might be worth a look?

Shaun Sheppard · 17 Jan 2019 at 14:42

mikedigitales said:
Would it be worth going for a gold or above PSU to save a little if it's an always on machine? The saving is probably small, bit you'd also be getting a better unit with a much longer warranty. Something like an EVGA G2 or G3 might be worth a look?

I've had a quick look, a gold PSU would cost £5 more for a Corsair TX550M 550W 80 Plus Gold PSU, so yes, I could certainly change the PSU.

My main concern is idle consumption, as the machine sits doing nothing most of the time, especially during the night and on weekends.

mikedigitales · 17 Jan 2019 at 14:50

Which Xeons are you running at the moment, that's some pretty heavy idle usage.

Shaun Sheppard · 17 Jan 2019 at 14:54

E5430 @ 2.66Ghz.

From the benchmarks I've found online, the AMD Ryzen 5 2600 should perform better than the Xeons I have, whilst using way less power.

To be honest, I'm puzzled as to why its using so much power, CPU usage is around 2%, and over the last week it hasn't gone above 30%.

mikedigitales · 17 Jan 2019 at 15:06

Ahhh that's quite an oldy, must be getting on 10 years old now - I think you are a big drop in idle power use whatever you pickup tbh. Something like an i5 8400 or Ryzen 2600 is going to be giving you a nice upgrade in processing power, with much lower power draw/heat output. Could you just drop as second hand Xeon in one of your microsevers? Also do you need ECC support? I don't think Ryzen or some of the newer consumer Intel support ECC.

fezster · 17 Jan 2019 at 15:13

I was looking at doing similar recently and found this blog post quite useful:

https://blog.patshead.com/2017/08/b...ce-ryzen-server-to-host-virtual-machines.html

Shaun Sheppard · 17 Jan 2019 at 15:17

fezster said:
I was looking at doing similar recently and found this blog post quite useful:

https://blog.patshead.com/2017/08/b...ce-ryzen-server-to-host-virtual-machines.html

Thanks, from the article it's reassuring to see that a roughly 50w idle is possible as the hardware in the article is similar.

WantoN · 17 Jan 2019 at 18:30

Sorry to butt in, but what device are you using to measure consumption?

My computer is always on and I want to see what difference it would make if I didn’t have my overclock constantly active, and if I allowed C states.

Shaun Sheppard · 17 Jan 2019 at 18:33

WantoN said:
Sorry to butt in, but what device are you using to measure consumption?

My computer is always on and I want to see what difference it would make if I didn’t have my overclock constantly active, and if I allowed C states.

I'm using a few Teckin Smart Plugs https://www.amazon.co.uk/TECKIN-Mon...=1547749953&sr=1-3&keywords=teckin+smart+plug as well as being able to switch sockets on and off, you can monitor power usage via an app on your phone too.

WantoN · 17 Jan 2019 at 18:41

Shaun Sheppard said:
I'm using a few Teckin Smart Plugs https://www.amazon.co.uk/TECKIN-Mon...=1547749953&sr=1-3&keywords=teckin+smart+plug as well as being able to switch sockets on and off, you can monitor power usage via an app on your phone too.

Awesome thanks man, was Alexa integration relatively seamless?

PiKe · 17 Jan 2019 at 18:53

Buy a used ml310e, idle is pretty low on those.

btph · 17 Jan 2019 at 19:04

Why doesn't it get turned off? If it was only on for 8hrs a day, you'd save two thirds.

andy_mk3 · 17 Jan 2019 at 19:25

That's extremely high idle power usage. My server has a pair of x5670's, 7 drives, 64gb ram. Running lots of docker containers and vm's, idle is around 140w. Power consumption is about 350w with both cpu's loaded.

Shaun Sheppard · 17 Jan 2019 at 20:03

btph said:
Why doesn't it get turned off? If it was only on for 8hrs a day, you'd save two thirds.

The reason it doesn't get turned off is shutting down the VM's and restarting it is a bit of a pain, especially if I had to do it every day.

PiKe · 17 Jan 2019 at 20:06

andy_mk3 said:
That's extremely high idle power usage. My server has a pair of x5670's, 7 drives, 64gb ram. Running lots of docker containers and vm's, idle is around 140w. Power consumption is about 350w with both cpu's loaded.

230w with similar spec on a s5500bc motherboard

skyripper · 17 Jan 2019 at 21:01

Shaun Sheppard said:
The reason it doesn't get turned off is shutting down the VM's and restarting it is a bit of a pain, especially if I had to do it every day.

VMWare you can set which VMs start on boot. Should be able to do the same with a bit of scripting on other hypervisors. And shutdown, you'd use the VM command line tools to power off each VM before shutting down the host. Test the script a few times then whack it in a cron job.

Electric time switch then brings the box back online when you like (or some BIOSes let you set an alarm time to wake the server)

Shaun Sheppard · 18 Jan 2019 at 09:29

I bit the bullet and ordered a Ryzen 5 2600, Gold PSU etc, so fingers crossed it'll pay for itself within a couple of years.

Shaun Sheppard · 20 Jan 2019 at 11:09

Quick update, I put together a system with the following;

AMD Ryzen 5 2600 CPU with Wraith Stealth Cooler
Gigabyte b450 ds3h motherboard
Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB RAM
Be Quiet! Pure Power 11 400w power supply
Crucial MX500 500GB SSD
Asus Geforce GT 710 (it's a server, the graphics card just needed to be passive to reduce noice)

Good news is, the system idles at around 40w, a massive reduction on the 270w the old system was idling at.

Performance wise, it kills the old system too.