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.
Just to add to the Asahi Linux chorus - I’m self hosting a bunch of things, not on VMs but installed on the actual OS, and it’s been incredibly fast and reliable. I do have thorough offsite backups happening because one should, but loving it so far.
“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?
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.
I have a couple older Minis in my Proxmox cluster. One’s a 2012 model and the other is a 2018. They both run great (and the 2018’s got 64GB of RAM and 10Gb Ethernet). I’m not sure I’d go looking for them for a homeland, but they’re great to repurpose.
I’ve been thinking more and more about getting a Mac Mini specifically for this as well. They’re silent, not too power hungry and more than powerful enough, and I would just love scripting in Swift on there 😆 (but maybe that’s just me).
How long have you had it setup like this? And what’s your experience been so far?
@BornDeranged Honestly, moving stuff to the cloud is trivial. Everything is in containers and I can just setup the nginx reverse proxy that’s also running on the VLAN to redirect to the cloud. Job done.
@Skunk Nice. I’m happy with the M2 running MacOS and just spinning up Linux VMs in UTM as needed. It seems to handle them without breaking a sweat and, for self hosted stuff, having the VM bridged to a VLAN tagged interface gives me that extra reassurance without having to have the whole machine on that interface.
If the baddies compromise the Friendica server, I can just Remote Desktop into the Mac and nuke the VM. Bye bye.
Yup it’s probably what I’ll end up doing if I can’t find my refurbished M1 (and I already own an M2 mostly used to fly long hauls flights on Xplane 12).
But I’ll wait till they launch the mini M3 to see what becomes available on the second hand market, then simply VM until Asahi Linux is mature enough.
Well not really, I’m not the one working on making a native M* chip Linux (but those guys are indeed insanely crazy, they are reverse engineering Mac, writing hardware specs and even correcting bugs for Apple).
It’s just another cool geek project like you could do with a pi, and ofc have bonus geek point for having an Apple silicons run Linux natively.
Plus, I will be so glad to resell my huge 18kg supermicro server.
Seems slightly unnecessary unless you have loads lying around, I’m still using a 10 year old dual core i3 and it doesn’t sweat running 60 services, and I can expand the storage much more than a Mac mini.
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Years ago I worked at a call center that had windows XP running on some type of mac mini PC .
Just to add to the Asahi Linux chorus - I’m self hosting a bunch of things, not on VMs but installed on the actual OS, and it’s been incredibly fast and reliable. I do have thorough offsite backups happening because one should, but loving it so far.
“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?
@ninjan friendica can get quite heavyweight.
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.
Sure but I meant small form factor stuff, which I haven’t seen any board with more than two slots and thus 64 GB cap.
Fair enough!
I happened to have one. It’s a decent little machine. They don’t seem to die.
However for hosting, I wouldn’t use them. Spec wise they kinda suck.
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What do you use between the container and the metal? I’ve just been running Ubuntu server under docker.
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I have a couple older Minis in my Proxmox cluster. One’s a 2012 model and the other is a 2018. They both run great (and the 2018’s got 64GB of RAM and 10Gb Ethernet). I’m not sure I’d go looking for them for a homeland, but they’re great to repurpose.
I’ve been thinking more and more about getting a Mac Mini specifically for this as well. They’re silent, not too power hungry and more than powerful enough, and I would just love scripting in Swift on there 😆 (but maybe that’s just me).
How long have you had it setup like this? And what’s your experience been so far?
@Skwiggs Few months. I was using an old laptop with Debian before but Friendica was cooking it, literally.
The M2 Mini doesn’t break a sweat. It just takes the load and gets on with it.
I did think about this, but finally abandoned the idea for 3 reasons:
That being said, if I had a spare Mac mini I would probably have tried 🤓
@BornDeranged Honestly, moving stuff to the cloud is trivial. Everything is in containers and I can just setup the nginx reverse proxy that’s also running on the VLAN to redirect to the cloud. Job done.
Sure. But if I hosted on an Apple Silicon, I would use native services where available. And Apple Silicon in the cloud is harder to find.
@BornDeranged I’m running everything in containers. Not got anything which cares which architecture the server is. Data is data.
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@aniki because it was the cheapest machine available for the performance I wanted in a useful form factor.
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@aniki As I said, I did the comparisons fully expecting to get a NUC. The Mac was cheaper at the performance point.
As for US prices, not especially relevant to me. Import taxes are a thing.
I want to do something like this
to replace my huge ass dual xenon and have less noise and electricity consumption.
I’m looking for a refurbished M1 Mac mini with 10Gbe but still out of luck.
Why the M1 and not M2 or 3 ? Price of course but also because Asahi Linux will work perfectly on M1 before the new chips.
@Skunk Nice. I’m happy with the M2 running MacOS and just spinning up Linux VMs in UTM as needed. It seems to handle them without breaking a sweat and, for self hosted stuff, having the VM bridged to a VLAN tagged interface gives me that extra reassurance without having to have the whole machine on that interface.
If the baddies compromise the Friendica server, I can just Remote Desktop into the Mac and nuke the VM. Bye bye.
Yup it’s probably what I’ll end up doing if I can’t find my refurbished M1 (and I already own an M2 mostly used to fly long hauls flights on Xplane 12).
But I’ll wait till they launch the mini M3 to see what becomes available on the second hand market, then simply VM until Asahi Linux is mature enough.
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Well not really, I’m not the one working on making a native M* chip Linux (but those guys are indeed insanely crazy, they are reverse engineering Mac, writing hardware specs and even correcting bugs for Apple).
It’s just another cool geek project like you could do with a pi, and ofc have bonus geek point for having an Apple silicons run Linux natively.
Plus, I will be so glad to resell my huge 18kg supermicro server.
Seems slightly unnecessary unless you have loads lying around, I’m still using a 10 year old dual core i3 and it doesn’t sweat running 60 services, and I can expand the storage much more than a Mac mini.
How come? Second hand HP Mini should be cheaper…
@TCB13 I was surprised as well.
I believe NUCs are more expensive than mini pcs and less bang for buck.
Check out intel i5 9th gen. You can get one with hdd for ~$250. Some of them support m2.
@deleted I couldn’t find one with equivalent performance to the M2 for less money.
I am not purchasing in dollars.