Comment by traveler1
3 months ago
I have an M4 Mac Mini running the following in a VM:
- OpenWRT (previously OPNSense & once Mikrotik RouterOS) using 2x 2.5Gbps Ethernet NICs via USB-C
- OpenMediaVault (Exposing a 4-bay DAS via USB-C, 2x3TB Drives in Btrfs RAID-1)
- HassOS (Home Assistant OS)
On the host, I'm running OLlama and a reverse proxy through Docker.
The whole thing uses 7 watts of power at any given time - I've seen max peaks of 12w when running LLM queries. The drive bay actually uses more than it.
Through power saving alone, it will pay for itself in 5 years over my previous AMD Zen 2 build.
My question was rather about MacOS guest(s) on a MacOS host. Contrarily to specialised linux distros (Home Assistant, OpenWRT...) MacOS doesn't strike me as particularly minimalistic won I wonder about the amount of overhead and plain storage requirements just running them idle...
I understand for specific MacOS or iOS development wanting template envs one would want to easily and repeatedly spawn up / destroy.
Out of curiosity, why not containers for OMV and Haas? QoS? And I’m dying to know what you are using openwrt for. I’m looking at setting up a Mini as well, and have been using Colima/LIMA to run containers on Rosetta/Mac vz locally and it seems to work well enough.
I assume you mean something other than OMV, ran in a container? Reason I put it in a VM was that I wanted to use a Linux compatible file system. I’m using BTRFS with raid, I’m sure I could have ran APFS in raid instead!
For haas, it was partly QoS, partly because I had historically ran all of my things separately. I might look at bringing that to the container level.
I’m using OpenWRT as my main router! One port to my LAN switch, one to the modem.
Haas has massive limitations in its container mode. (Add-ons, OTA updates,...)
I’d use a Mac Mini in a heartbeat if they had an ECC option :(
What is your use case where not having an ECC is critical? Assuming something related to complex calculations that cannot fail and takes a lot of time to process?
If you care about your data, you want ECC. If a bitflip happens in memory, zfs will for example, not catch the error and happily write out the corrupted file.
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