Looking to make a VM/NAS Home Lab -- Go with Ryzen or wait for Naples?

[cekuro]

Hey guys,

 

I wanted to get the opinions of how feasible it is to do a Home Server/NAS build? Long term goal is an on-demand (via WOL) NAS and Email server, short-term is an on-demand home-lab where I can spin up VMs remotely to use for various things, primarily networking (think GNS3). Would a Ryzen 1700/1700X be good with the high core count? I would be maxing out the memory at 32GB immediately--which is a slight bummer because in the long term I would prefer 64 GB. Since the memory cap is holding me back, going with something server grade like the upcoming Naples seems promising for a budget solution, but how much of a price jump would I be expecting? I was this to be a semi-long term server so I am willing to spend my budget anywhere between 1800 and 2500. Thoughts, suggestions? 

[pbx2]

Go for a Xeon, maybe an older one like the 2660, you can get two of them and a motherboard for sub $500 i beleve.

[Rohime]

3 minutes ago, cekuro said:

Thoughts, suggestions? 

Its really very dependent on who many VM's and what they are doing.

 

For most hypervisors these days the number of cores (once you are above a reasonable minimum) don't matter that much, as long as you are not running a multitude of 'idle' VM's.    ie: obviously dont try to run 10 cores of real workload capacity on an 8 core machine -- it simply doesnt fit.   But you can easily run 32 cores of VM's at 5% busy each machine.    (4:1 is actually a good over-subscription ratio).

 

MORE important for VM's (especially some the hypervisors that dont handle memory well) is the memory over-subscription.

 

Of greatest importance for a platform that you are Wakeing-From-LAN will be your disk I/O performance.  You will want to boot from the fastest multi-path storage you can get if you wake / sleep a significant percent of the time.   In this day and age that probably means NVMe SSD's for boot images.

[leadeater]

A used server would be much cheaper, LGA1366 systems go for very cheap and will do everything you need. You'll be able to get a dual CPU 12c/24t with 128GB ram and a couple of SSDs for around 500 USD.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id get a dell r710 or simmilar. You got a memory limite of 288gb and ecc. 

 

If you can spend more, go for a dell r720, so a max of 768gb and dual 12 cores.

 

I woudn't wait on amd for server stuff.

[itsnippets]

Id do this on a budget. Id get some old datacenter kit (rackmount or otherwise) from Ebay where dual xeon processors in a server can be £100ish. Granted they are, heavy, noisy and generally power hungry, but you would save a fortune initially.