Single Machine Multiple Servers vs Multiple Machines?

[corinthos]

For home use that's not mission critical at the moment, but where reliability still matters, is there any compelling reason to go with separate machines for each server over having a single machine with many cores perform the same functions?

From what I understand:

Single Machine That Does It All:
Disadvantages:
1. If the Host OS crashes, hardware fails, hard drive experiences data corruption or gets a virus, power surge causes a reboot, etc., the ALL of the virtualized servers go down too.

2. If you game on the same server, risk of crash or other issues would go up as well.

3. If you perform an update on the HOST OS and the OS requires a reboot, that effectively takes down the rest of the servers.

Advantages:
1. Cost and space savings. Electricity savings. Reduced heat.


Also, for the most popular/common uses of servers, if you do group them by purpose, and to limit vulnerability to downtime, data loss and whatnot, how would you group them together?

 

[sdifox]

VMs have taken over, unless you got some esoteric software that just won't work in a vm.

Want redundancy? Build three VM host and setup HA.

Your reboots can happen in the middle of the night

 

[Yakk]

Yeah, running multiple VMs on a CPU like Threadripper is easily within reach and budget for everyday consumers now. You can even throw in some ECC RAM if it's misson critical, or just paranoid.

And it's just all around safer to run everything in separate VMs.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Do you have a specific use in mind, or are you just curious?

If you want to build something, tell us what you plan to run on it and the expected loads. A cheap i3, i5 or Ryzen would be fine for many home uses. Even an Atom would work for a media server that didn't do transcoding.

 

[Smoblikat]

Depends on the applications youre trying to host. I once ran an apache server, a minecraft server, and a media streaming server off of a pentium dual core with an IDE hard drive, I got by.