I have been on a quest to shrink the footprint of power consumption in the home lab as energy prices continue to go up around the world. There is a setting in the BIOS called C States that can lead to massive power savings and allow you to drastically cut the amount of power your home server takes to run. We take a look at this and how you can use this in conjunction with VMware ESXi and Proxmox to have a low power home server.
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Written version of today’s video: https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2024/09/enable-cpu-c-states-for-massive-power-savings-for-your-home-server/
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Introduction to low power server hacks – 0:00
Today’s sponsor – NAKIVO Backup & Replication – 0:41
Why is power consumption a concer? 1:22
VMware ESXi power optimizations overview – 1:58
Power management policy – 2:20
Overview of low power mode – 2:50
CPU power states in the BIOS – 3:00
Looking at enabling the BIOS C states for CPU power management – 3:33
Using ESXi’s advanced CPU power settings – 5:23
Listing esxcli system settings command to change power management policy – 5:50
Changing the setting from the command line – 6:38
Proxmox power optimizations overview – 7:20
Introducing Powertop – 7:25
Overview of the auto tune parameter of Powertop – 8:00
Overview of installing Powertop – 8:24
Running powertop and overview of tabs and columns – 8:40
Tunables tab for purposes of auto tune parameter – 9:46
Running the powertop auto tune command – 10:25
Powertop settings are not persistent after a reboot – 11:14
Creating a system service to run the auto tune paramete after startup – 11:35
Adjusting the CPU scaling governor – 12:35
Running your servers in headless mode – 14:04
Shutdown your servers when they are not used – 15:00
Significant power savings in ESXi – 15:41
Considering low power configuration modifications – 16:01
