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.

  • goatsarahOP
    2•1 year ago

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

    • Aniki 🌱🌿English
      1•1 year ago

      Then why are you so hung up on running server processes on mac minis? That just seems like bad infrastructure design.

      • goatsarahOP
        3•1 year ago

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

        • Aniki 🌱🌿English
          1•1 year ago

          I think that’s highly wrong on both counts. And what are you going to do when your storage or memory breaks on a soldered motherboard? You just doubled your expenditure and you’ll only get back to where you were.

          Don’t host on a Mac. Use the mac as a mac and get a NUC to run your VMs on with a Linux host. You can get a 12th gen Intel NUC for like a hundred bucks.

          • goatsarahOP
            1•1 year 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.