Now that I have my ZFS filesystem spanning several drives in place on my Z440, I wanted to get an idea of how this setup is performing together with the underlying LUKS encryption. And while I am at it, the other questions I had in mind were: How does this compare to the ext4/LUKS combination … Continue reading SSD, ZFS and VM performance – Workstation Power At Home – Part 12
This is a quick follow-up post to the previous one in which I’ve written about how straight forward it is to use ZFS to combine several physical SSDs or disk drives to use the combined capacity for a file system. The one thing I left out in the description was how to encrypt the setup. … Continue reading ZFS with LUKS – Workstation Power At Home – Part 11
In previous parts of this series I’ve been looking at CPU power, GPU power, virtualization, remote graphical GUIs and networking of my refurbished Z440 workstation. The next thing on my list of things I wanted to improve in my computing setup was storage. So far, I was mostly using ext4 filesystems on partitions on physical … Continue reading ZFS for Storage – A Primer – Workstation Power At Home – Part 10
After the both good and bad performance of my Lenovo X250 and Ubuntu 20.04 over a 2.5GbE link to my workstation, I couldn’t just leave the topic but had to further investigate how I could potentially improve throughput when using Ubuntu’s Nautilus file manager to transfer files to and from the workstation. And again, some … Continue reading 2.5GbE Performance Revisited – Workstation Power At Home – Part 9
I’m quite amazed I am already into part 8 in this series of exploring the limits of using a headless workstation as a ‘power booster’ next to my notebook. The next thing I have taken a closer look at is the connection between the notebook and the workstation, a 1 Gbit/s Ethernet link. That’s good … Continue reading 2.5GbE Network Performance – Workstation Power at Home – Part 8
In two previous posts I wrote about how to use RDP and VNC to access the graphical desktops of the virtual machines on my headless workstation. Both have in common that the desktop of the remote virtual machine is put into a window on my client machine. That is great for many purposes and when … Continue reading Remote Visual Computing – Remote X over SSH – Workstation Power At Home – Part 7
In the previous episode I’ve described how to use the Remmina remote desktop client in combination with the Virtualbox RDP remote screen capabilities to graphically interact with my virtual machines on my headless workstation server. While this works great it has two disadvantages: RDP requires a lot of bandwidth in combination with low latency. This … Continue reading Remote Visual Computing with VNC – Workstation Power At Home – Part 6
In addition to running computing intensive applications on my new (refurbished) HP Z440 workstation the other main use case for me is to offload the virtual machines I am running on my notebook today. While I do have 16 GB of RAM in my notebook it becomes more and more difficult to run two virtual … Continue reading Remote Visual Computing with RDP – Workstation Power At Home – Part 5
High processing power comes with high power consumption. I guess that can’t be helped much but one way to reduce the power bill for that number-crunching ‘headless’ workstation under the desk without screen and keyboard is to suspend it at night and at times during the day when it is not needed. As long as … Continue reading Workstation Power at Home – Part 4 – Power and Remote Suspend
In the previous post I ran FFmpeg and Handbrake on the 6 core CPU of my workstation and got a good but still modest 2.5x speedup of the video encoding task compared to running the same operation on notebook. I would have expected at least a 5x speedup and I’m still puzzled why I didn’t … Continue reading Workstation Power at Home – Part 3 – FFmpeg on the GPU