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.

  • @BornDerangedEnglish
    4•7 months ago

    I did think about this, but finally abandoned the idea for 3 reasons:

    1. Not much choice of hardware
    2. Unlikely to come across old hardware of that type to repurpose
    3. Much harder to move workloads from/to the cloud if necessary.

    That being said, if I had a spare Mac mini I would probably have tried 🤓

    • goatsarahOP
      0•7 months ago

      @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.

      • @BornDerangedEnglish
        2•7 months ago

        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.

        • goatsarahOP
          0•7 months ago

          @BornDeranged I’m running everything in containers. Not got anything which cares which architecture the server is. Data is data.

            • goatsarahOP
              1•7 months ago

              @aniki because it was the cheapest machine available for the performance I wanted in a useful form factor.

                • goatsarahOP
                  0•7 months ago

                  @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.