4mo ago

Do you poweroff your server during night / unused times?

I believe this is a slightly controversial topic, at least from what I have gathered so far. Some say its best to leave the server on to spare the life time of the spinning rust. Other seem to prefer to save power and boot the server off each night. So wanted to chip in and hear what folks here do and why do what you do.

Bonus question; Do you guys have a UPS? Is it a must have for a homelab, or does it just depend on the usecase?

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In pretty much any enterprise using the public cloud. Everything is auto scaling, so shutdowns when not needed. Dev environments shutdown over night... If you're not shutting down and scaling in the public cloud, you're doing it wrong.
- Ok scaling is not what we’re talking about here lol.
  
  Is it shutting down servers... Yes. it just does it based on parameters and thresholds.
  Then you get things like VDI servers and jump boxes that only need to be on between certain hours, so get shutdown outside them hours.
  
  No Donny it’s not. You’re out of your element here.
  
  They're fuckin' nihilists dude, they don't believe in anything
  
  But it is. They're stopped and deallocated. They start up when demanded. And shutdown when below a threshold or a certain schedule.
  
  I’m starting to understand why British admins are paid so much less than their American counterparts.
  
  You do understand, when you have VM's set to auto scale, they shutdown when not in use, if you're using horizontal scaling.
  
  Right you don't shut them down, you scale them down. My server also uses less power off peak demand.
  
  No we shut them down. They get deallocated the same way as shutting down a virtual server does. They're not containers, the scaling part just turns them on and off based on workload or schedule
  
  Most of us don't have clusters so shutting down the server means taking the server and all associated services completely offline.
  Do you take your product completely offline for 8 hours every single day?
- I see where your head is at here, but it sounds like you're focusing on containerized items. A lot of people are going to look at you real weird if you think of scaling down a container as equivalent to shutting down a server. We can all see where your mind is going and there is logic there, but it's more akin to closing chrome when you're not using it than it is to shutting down the computer running chrome.
  
  Even physical hardware, if your paying power you can have clusters of physical hardware power up and down based on usage. There is no point in having 10 physical hosts running when the workload for n+1 means 3 servers overnight. With bnc, ipmi, ilo, idrac it will power them up as needed.
  
  Finally someone who gets it.
  
  Yup. I run those kind of clusters. But unless your in home datacenter territory, that sort of config isn't likely to happen in self hosted.

102 comments