What Changed#
Added Ansible playbooks to Semaphore for automated Proxmox cluster power management:
- Night Sleep: Gracefully shuts down non-essential VMs/LXCs at night
- Day On: Wakes up the cluster in the morning
- Scheduled via Semaphore cron
Why#
Running all VMs 24/7 wastes power when they’re not needed. Automated scheduling reduces energy costs and wear on hardware.
Details#
- Service: Semaphore (Ansible automation)
- Playbooks:
night-sleep.yml,day-on.yml - API: Uses centralized Proxmox API host for cluster-wide operations
- Scheduling: Semaphore cron with
SEMAPHORE_SCHEDULE_TIMEZONE=America/Los_Angeles
Important gotcha: Semaphore’s cron scheduler ignores the container’s TZ variable. Must set SEMAPHORE_SCHEDULE_TIMEZONE explicitly or schedules run in UTC.
Result#
Non-essential services now sleep from 11 PM to 7 AM Pacific. Essential services (DNS, reverse proxy, backups) remain running.
Semaphore dashboard showing daily Shutdown/Start cycle — all green across weeks of automated runs.