Is it bad to keep my host machines to be on for like 3 months? With no down time?
What is the recommend? What do you do?
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I had one Linux server that was up for over 500 days. It would have been up longer but I was organizing some cables and accidentally unplugged it.
Where I worked as a developer we had Sun Solaris servers as desktops to do my dev work on. I would just leave it on even during the weekends and vacations, it also had our backup webserver on it so we just let to run 100%. One day the sys admin said you may want to reboot your computer, it’s been over 600 days. 😆 I guess he didn’t have to reboot after patching all that time and I didn’t have any issues with it.
wait, they shut off? who knew.
Never.
Prod environments typically don’t have downtime. Save for patching every quarter that requires a host reboot.
i have a year of uptime, i need to shut down and clean the servers out but have not cared enough to do that.
I have been turning mine off more frequently now that my electric rates have jumped 30% in the last two months. I’m currently looking to dump the 11 year old server hardware for both my nas and hypervisor server and consolidate everything into a modern lower power single system. Most likely using Truenas Scale.
When do I shut down?
- When the power goes out and my UPS battery drains.
- When I do a hardware upgrade.
- If I want to rearrange equipment, and also when I moved this past summer.
That’s seriously about it.
I run ESXi on most of my systems. So that means, when there is an update of ESXi, I install the updates and reboot them.
Sometimes I need to change hardware or upgrade stuff. Then too.
I took my docker host offline yesterday, because of a RAM upgrade (16GB > 24GB, yeah, I’m aware I lost dual-channel). I regularly check for updates on non-ESXi machines.
Some people love 100% uptime of their servers. I hate it. When somebody has high uptime, it means they are lazy and don’t keep up with updates, which are critical most of the time.
In the year mine has been running… it’s been offline twice. Once, when upgrading the memory. The other was when I upgraded the processors. The only other time was a software update. Didn’t require a reboot.
I shut down my NAS after work because I tend to not use it’s services outside yet and saving like 2/3 of a day in electricity is worth it. For the machines that provide services like networking and security they run on UPS 24/7 up until there is a need to update or a UPS has a failure
You shutdown servers? I guess when I clean out dust 🤷♂️
Do you virtualize/pool host to separate function from hardware? If yes, then go nuts shutting off hardware as needed for service.
Otherwise, the correct answers are “annually as part of a practical DR review”, “only when the electric company cuts you off for non-payment”, and “as often as needed to keep a spouse off your back”.
My Proxmox VM host ran for well over a year and I had to shut it down to add more RAM when I finally bought it. A couple VMs on it ran for just as long. All Linux stuff. Windows guest have to reboot minimum every 90 days or things start getting weird, just a DC
mine is small and idles at 17 watts, but i’ll shut it down if i don’t use for many days. also when i’m on vacation.
Sometimes I don’t need all the things running so I’ll kill a few pi’s and disks