factorialandha

Id say pretty much any graphics card that supports dual monitor for this would be fine, For example, most businesses use dual screens with on board Intel graphics. (we do that where i work) Modern Intel computers come with dual display outputs these days.

You want to look at NIC Teaming, Windows doesnt support this on none server operating systems i dont think, so you would have to see if your network card has drivers that support doing it. Some of them do, some of them dont. Otherwise you will have to use a windows server OS in order to achieve this most likely.

First i would pick a language that you want to learn based on what you want to do -> the info graphic below is quite fun (just as a tid bit) As for resources, im not aware of any free ones, but Udemy has quite a lot of discount deals regularly so might be good to look at.

You could build your own, using a few SSDS in raid, depending on your IO requirements. There are a handful of 10 Gigabit homes NAS devices that you can probably find on amazon or through google quite easily. Ive personally never used any. You will also need a 10gigabit capable switch also which from my last searching arent cheap. so depends on your budget.

My first question would be, what throughput are you looking for from each machine concurrently ? For example for 12 machines to concurrently download / upload at the same rate of say 10Mbit per second, your storage would need to have AT LEAST 1 gigabit connection (not doing the math so i might be a little off with that calculation) Also your throughput will be bottlenecked by the type of storage, if you have 12 people all downloading different files, and a single drive, then your IO will bottleneck while it tries to pull the different pieces of data. There is more information required to give you a true answer. But based off this, you will definitely want to be at least 10gigabit on your NAS, meaning you will require a switch which supports at least 1 10 gigabit port

windows preallocates a good chunk of memory generally below is mine for example, Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 16.0 GB Total Physical Memory 15.6 GB Available Physical Memory 6.69 GB Total Virtual Memory 22.1 GB Available Virtual Memory 7.96 GB Virtual memory is generally the page file on the disk. Your best option is to check in task manager what is using up memory, and aslong as nothing is specific eating memory, you might find that its just preallocated to improve performance, Windows caches some items in memory to speed up items, this memory isnt available but will be freed up if required. Aslong as your computer isnt running extremely slow and there isnt processes listed in task manager using up a lot of memory, then its just the operating system caching and allocating memory to background processes, which is normal in my opinion, people always look at these figures and think theres a problem when a lot of the time, there isnt.

Im going to leave the hardware itself to someone else, however my one note for you to consider is ESXi can be extremely specific as to what hardware it will support. You might want to check its hardware compatibility to make sure the CPU / RAM / Motherboard are all supported, otherwise it will pretty much just tell you NO on the installation. I think (historically at least) it had very specific CPU requirements, server level CPUs that is, im not sure if they removed that requirement, but i do remember trying to install it on a non server SKU CPU a long time ago and it basically told me no, even if it would technically have worked. If you arent specific about running vmware then the hardware should work perfectly fine with other hypervisors.

do you happen to have a freesync monitor ? Could be the new drivers enabling freesync and your monitor isnt supported enough to work ? Also what version of drivers have you tried ? not sure when freesync functionality got added exactly, may need to roll back a little further ?

Being single threaded does not necessarily mean the OS will not put it on 1 specific CPU core, it just means that applications runs in single threaded mode. The operating system will generally give out whatever cores it deems eligible during the time the applications functions run. Processor affinity actually tells the OS to always use the same cpu / core. Which in some cases can have a performance benefit, however in most cases the OS will just assign whatever cores it wants to your application threaded or multi threaded does not matter. I dont know the specifics of it all, but im sure a quick google search should yield some more in depth information about how it all works.

This is disk management if you right click on your start button it should be an option there. You will see on the screenshot above you might have Disk 1 and instead of it saying online it will say offline / uninitialized. right click on it and then click initialize then you can create a partition out of the empty space and format it.

Have you double checked disk management in windows, sometimes they dont show up because they need to be initialized. Check Disk management and see how many disks are showing. You might see what that states uninitialized, right click and click initialize then you can create partitions etc.

Changing the motherboard after an installation wont work generally, you can hit driver issues, If you can still boot the drive on the OLD system it was installed on, then you could attempt to sysprep /generalize it, which strips it back to basic drivers. This should allow you to swap the drive into a different machine (aslong as its not a completely different chipset / driver set (eg i wouldnt do it moving from an Intel machine to an AMD machine or vice versa) However id personally just do a fresh install, it removes any doubt of weird conflicts from the old installation.

personally, id ask the question in the opposite way. What kind of workloads are you wanting to do, and then someone will recommend the best option for you.

The only part about LTX that i hate right now, is that its the weekend after San Diego comicon (Again), and i cant afford to do both I was really hoping this year it would be at least a few weeks between the two. Oh well, maybe next year.

From a NAS perspective i use Unraid, its really good for a simple File storage system, and you can install docker containers for internet based file sharing etc. It also allows mixing and matching of drive sizes, however if you want true raid with striping and all the performance benefits, then im not sure if unraid supports that myself. im sure there are plenty of FreeNAS documents out there on the best practices for what you need. But it sounds like you might want to use "use defaults" if you dont want to screw anything up ? Ive personally never used FreeNAS (at least not yet), so hopefully someone else here has more insight into that aspect, otherwise a lot of google searches could yield some good results im sure