I am planning to build a multipurpose home server. It will be a NAS, virtualization host, and have the typical selfhosted services. I want all of these services to have high uptime and be protected from power surges/balckouts, so I will put my server on a UPS.
I also want to run an LLM server on this machine, so I plan to add one or more GPUs and pass them through to a VM. I do not care about high uptime on the LLM server. However, this of course means that I will need a more powerful UPS, which I do not have the space for.
My plan is to get a second power supply to power only the GPUs. I do not want to put this PSU on the UPS. I will turn on the second PSU via an Add2PSU.
In the event of a blackout, this means that the base system will get full power and the GPUs will get power via the PCIe slot, but they will lose the power from the dedicated power plug.
Obviously this will slow down or kill the LLM server, but will this have an effect on the rest of the system?
Honestly you should just bypass dells management software and use NUT. It supports your UPS’s management card if you enable SNMP or you can bypass it all together and just run off of the USB/serial.
I’m pretty surprised I can run my whole network for an hour off of my 1500va UPS with three switches and a handful of POE devices. I’m still thinking about replacing it with a rack mount unit so i can lock it inside my rack as I’ve been having issues with unauthorized people messing with it.