today my dual E5-2680v4 processors arrived. I installed them with fresh thermal paste and at boot my system idled at 80w… that was according to iLO and a smart power monitor plug that monitors everything plugged into that outlet.

after 5 minutes of run time with 5 - VMs currently running I’m sitting at 120w as a high and 100w average.

My current setup is a DL360 Gen9 with 128gb DDR4. 2 x E5 - 2680 V4 that just replaced my pair of 2637 v3 I should note I don’t have any spinning drives installed, only 5 x 128mb sata SSD. I also have an extra 4 port 1gbs PCI card installed and I added p440ar since my server didn’t come with a SAS card only the built in sata controller.

Once my slightly longer SAS cables arrive so I can connect the p440ar I’ll eventually be at 8x2.5" SAS, 4xsata SSD, 8x3.5" SAS and 4x2.5" sata.

But here we are today running idle at about 100w in my gen9 with a peak of 120w under load.

Alder Lake

ok you got me. The 2680s are in the mail still and should be here next week… maybe friday. It currently has dual 2637s but my idle is 90~100w with just proxmox and 5 SSD and 150w running all my services. Once the processors are in we’ll see how it does but since the TDP is less per processor I don’t anticipate a jump in consumption.

for context my plex has 5 people at home, 3 teens + 2 adults, I also have about a half dozen remote family and friends that use it. I run plex in docker without a GPU for transcoding and I can stream 3+ users with ease… a GPU would be better but I’m not there yet. Honestly plex is not that resource hungry except for transcoding, I’ve been testing plex lately and for me there is 0 difference between docker in a VM and bare metal.

As for home assistant I have it running over 70 wifi devices and sensors, controlling almost every light, my HVAC system 100% in both my house and garage, timers, notifications, power monitoring with solar and EV charging, etc… and it runs on a VM with 2 cpu cores and 4gb of memory and 8gb HDD. It takes almost nothing to run.

My docker server is ubuntu 22.04 in a VM with 8 cores and 16gb ram and I just doubled both of those for testing plex transcoding performance… I might go back to 4 & 8 but I have the resources so I’ll probably leave it.

I also run TrueNas in a VM with 4c/16gb ram attached to a dedicated HBA with 4x4tb drives for media. This also runs perfectly fine.

Honestly I ran all that on a i5-6500 with 32gb of ram and dual 128 SDD for boot until my PSU died and this new server was the cheaper option. With the server I can spin up VMs for testing and playing…

if you want to go big with resources go for it… couldn’t hurt. But honestly windows gobbles resources, Linux not so much… my only concern now is that I have a single point of failure with that server but it’s far more robust than any consumer grade tech and I have backups.

for what it’s worth I picked up a used HP DL360 gen9 server and it came with dual 80 platinum power supplies, 128gb DDR, and dual Xeon 2680v4 (28c/56t) processors… no HDD but the cost was $150… I actually got the the server with for $100 and I then I got a pair of used processors of ebay for an extra $50…

with a few SAS cables and my 4tb drives from my old server… I migrated everything over to this server running proxmox and I’m hitting 150w average which is less than my previous bare metal devices.

It might not work for everyone, but I’m glad I decided to make the jump to enterprise hardware as I was looking for reliability and reducing my power load overall.

few things… is plex serving your home mostly? mine doesn’t transcode much at all unless it goes across the internet. I haven’t done much with Jellyfin yet so I can’t comment but my Plex server has moved from bare metal to, VM (fat and LXC) in proxmox, docker on bare metal, and lately docker running in a VM on my proxmox. The Plex server needs very little resources except for transcoding. Passing a GPU through proxmox to VM running docker with plex is working well.

Home assistant needs very little computer power and runs fine on a pi so anything can really run HA.

I use TrueNAS scale as my disk storage… both bare metal and inside proxmox as a VM.

Frigate and Blue Iris are next on my list this winter so I can’t comment.

Basically I’ve moved to a single HP DL360 gen9 with dual Xeon 2850v4 (28c/56t) and 128gb DDR… cost was $150 plus storage… this runs all my VMs at 150w and it’s rock solid. Previously I was using low power consumer devices but these 10 year old servers can be found fairly cheap and have redundancy and high quality built in.

Long story short I had a commodity power supply fail in my desktop and I could buy a server with dual power supplies for less money than a used replacement ATX PSU.

Food for thought but I’m happy I made the switch to enterprise grade equipment over consumer.