VM 10 Watt penalty when idle

[FrankH]

Hello,

I already used the search function but couldnt find an answer to my question.

I'm running Proxmox 6.2 on a small Homeserver ( Headless, B450 MB , 32GB Ram, 4 SSD ).
After some tweaking with tips from the forum, i have now an IDLE power consumption of

30 - 35 Watt --> 7 running LXC containers

Adding one Linux VM ( Debian / Ubuntu / 1 core / 4 core --> no difference ) add ~ 9 Watt to this.

39 - 43 Watt --> 7 running LXC containers + 1 empty running VM

Do you think its worth to further investigate to bring down the IDLE consumption of the VM ?

br,

Frank

 

[LnxBil]

Have you checked with powertop? Normally the VM should perform more wake up cycles, therefore the power consumption is much higher.

I just checked on my small ITX PVE box and I can also see an increase in power consumption while booting, but until the OS loaded (Debian Buster NFS-Server without any clients), the power consumption returns to almost normal, but is minimally higher (10,2 instead of 9,8 W).

 

[FrankH]

Hi LnxBil,

thanks for your reply.

With the help of your recommendation to use powertop I could identify the problem.
The overall power usage was 0,1% , but the USB devices ( i used standard settings ) shows 100 usage.
Disabling them in the VM settings brought down to the idle ~1Watt increase which you mentioned for you
installation.

I know, 10W doesn't sound much, but it sums up to unnecessary 25 Euro / Year here in Germany.

Thanks again,

Frank