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.
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.
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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).
The Apple silicon chips are just insane in performance vs power usage and that is exactly what I need now, a SFF powerful chip that stay silent and doesn’t cost an arm.
I will be so glad to resell my huge 18kg supermicro server, and ofc have bonus geek point for having an Apple silicons run Linux natively. It’s just another cool geek project like you could do with a pi.
@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.