good platform for multi-VM home server?

[Kalm_Traveler]

I'm thinking next year to put a rig together to take on a few different tasks for home such as:

 

NFS/NAS

VPN

Firewall

DHCP

security camera management

 

and ideally maybe have a few cores to spare for some sandbox VMs for projects / experiments / etc

 

Obviously just buying a legit server prebuilt would work but I want to build something from scratch for the experience and fun, so what kind of parts would you guys suggest?

 

No hard limit, but I also don't want to spend more than what I'll actually benefit from.

[Electronics Wizardy]

How much do you care about noise and power?

 

How much storage do you need?

 

Id go dual lga 1366 here, there normally about 200-400 with lots of ram and decent cpu's. Look for a used r710 on ebay. 

 

 

[Kalm_Traveler]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

How much do you care about noise and power?

 

How much storage do you need?

 

Id go dual lga 1366 here, there normally about 200-400 with lots of ram and decent cpu's. Look for a used r710 on ebay. 

 

 

this will be in a cold basement storage room, so no concerns about noise really - power... I mean.... I was mining for 6 months with ~ 24 1080 Ti level cards. If it's substantially less than that I'll feel comfortable.

 

Storage at least 10-12 TB ideally. 

 

Physical space is a bit of a constraint though as I don't think I can easily fit an actual rack mount server in there, with adequate airflow.

 

if possible I was thinking to do this with something modern so that I can basically set it all up and forget about it from an in-person sense.

[Electronics Wizardy]

14 minutes ago, Kalm_Traveler1 said:

this will be in a cold basement storage room, so no concerns about noise really - power... I mean.... I was mining for 6 months with ~ 24 1080 Ti level cards. If it's substantially less than that I'll feel comfortable.

 

Storage at least 10-12 TB ideally. 

 

Physical space is a bit of a constraint though as I don't think I can easily fit an actual rack mount server in there, with adequate airflow.

  

if possible I was thinking to do this with something modern so that I can basically set it all up and forget about it from an in-person sense.

If you want modern id go with a it r7 2700. Pretty low power, fairly cheap. Id personally get a used rack server as you can put much more ram in it(your probably gonna be ram limited, and ddr3r is pretty cheap and those systems can hold lots of it)

[Kalm_Traveler]

28 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

If you want modern id go with a it r7 2700. Pretty low power, fairly cheap. Id personally get a used rack server as you can put much more ram in it(your probably gonna be ram limited, and ddr3r is pretty cheap and those systems can hold lots of it)

how much RAM do you think i"ll need for this thing?

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Kalm_Traveler1 said:

how much RAM do you think i"ll need for this thing?

32gb is my min for this type of stuff. Id go 2x16gb sticks so you can easily upgrade. 64gb would be nice 

 

[Kalm_Traveler]

11 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

32gb is my min for this type of stuff. Id go 2x16gb sticks so you can easily upgrade. 64gb would be nice 

 

Would a Threadripper 1950x rig be good for running all these things? I noticed they are only $500 new now which seems like a steal for 16 core / 32 threads and ECC support... 

 

I'm thinking 1950x, 64gb 2133mhz ECC unregistered DDR4, 512gb Samsung 970 EVO ssd for hypervisor, VM images etc, 5 8tb Seagate ironwolf NAS hdds for bulk storage. 

 

What do you think? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

10 hours ago, Kalm_Traveler1 said:

Would a Threadripper 1950x rig be good for running all these things? I noticed they are only $500 new now which seems like a steal for 16 core / 32 threads and ECC support... 

 

I'm thinking 1950x, 64gb 2133mhz ECC unregistered DDR4, 512gb Samsung 970 EVO ssd for hypervisor, VM images etc, 5 8tb Seagate ironwolf NAS hdds for bulk storage. 

 

What do you think? 

For your listed uses, the threadripper is way overkill, a ryzen 7 will be plenty in terms of cpu power here. If you want the fastest, id go dual xeon, there much faster, can hold much more ram(and the ram is cheaper too) and there is better hypervisor support.

 

What hypervisor do you plan to go with?

 

That ssd looks fine, id be tempted to get a 1tb if you can though.

 

Those hdds are fine. If you want cheaper, in the us get those external easystore drive.

[Kalm_Traveler]

17 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

For your listed uses, the threadripper is way overkill, a ryzen 7 will be plenty in terms of cpu power here. If you want the fastest, id go dual xeon, there much faster, can hold much more ram(and the ram is cheaper too) and there is better hypervisor support.

 

What hypervisor do you plan to go with?

 

That ssd looks fine, id be tempted to get a 1tb if you can though.

 

Those hdds are fine. If you want cheaper, in the us get those external easystore drive.

ooh ok, so 8 cores would be fine to run those server functions and still have plenty of cores left over for running sandbox VMs on top of it all? (thinking a Kali Linux sandbox and a Windows 10 sandbox). I looked at the r710 but again don't think I can fit a rack server properly in the space - I have plenty of vertical space but not as much horizontal space in there.

 

Hypervisor I was thinking something like VMWare vCenter and ESXi since I'm somewhat familiar with them from work. 

 

I can definitely up the SSD to 1tb - again there isn't a hard and fast budget for this server, I just want to make sure that it does everything I could possibly want it to do - and does it well once all the parts are together.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, Kalm_Traveler1 said:

ooh ok, so 8 cores would be fine to run those server functions and still have plenty of cores left over for running sandbox VMs on top of it all? (thinking a Kali Linux sandbox and a Windows 10 sandbox). I looked at the r710 but again don't think I can fit a rack server properly in the space - I have plenty of vertical space but not as much horizontal space in there.

 

Hypervisor I was thinking something like VMWare vCenter and ESXi since I'm somewhat familiar with them from work. 

 

I can definitely up the SSD to 1tb - again there isn't a hard and fast budget for this server, I just want to make sure that it does everything I could possibly want it to do - and does it well once all the parts are together.

VMS can share cores, so don't worry about the core count, the ryzen 7 has more than enough cpu power here.

 

You can put a rack server the long way, What are the dimentions of this space.

 

Id look at proxmox for this, its free, and you get zfs support on the host. 

 

 

[Kalm_Traveler]

26 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

VMS can share cores, so don't worry about the core count, the ryzen 7 has more than enough cpu power here.

 

You can put a rack server the long way, What are the dimentions of this space.

 

Id look at proxmox for this, its free, and you get zfs support on the host. 

 

 

ooh gotcha, thanks - good to know! 

 

The spot I was intending to put this thing (assuming it stays in the basement bomb shelter) is about 6.5 feet tall x 7.5 feet long x 18 inches deep. Right now I have a wire shelf there with my old Cooler Master HAF X case, a keyboard and mouse, and 27" 1080p monitor on top all set up nice and clean. The rig sucks though, H270 Gigabyte board, core i5 7600, 32gb 2666 DDR4, 256gb nvme OS drive, and two 4tb desktop HDDs in RAID 1.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Kalm_Traveler1 said:

ooh gotcha, thanks - good to know! 

 

The spot I was intending to put this thing (assuming it stays in the basement bomb shelter) is about 6.5 feet tall x 7.5 feet long x 18 inches deep. Right now I have a wire shelf there with my old Cooler Master HAF X case, a keyboard and mouse, and 27" 1080p monitor on top all set up nice and clean. The rig sucks though, H270 Gigabyte board, core i5 7600, 32gb 2666 DDR4, 256gb nvme OS drive, and two 4tb desktop HDDs in RAID 1.

You can easily fit a rack server in there, just set it up vertically, there less than the 18 in wide.

 

That old rig though should be able to do all that you listed above aswell.

[Kalm_Traveler]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You can easily fit a rack server in there, just set it up vertically, there less than the 18 in wide.

 

That old rig though should be able to do all that you listed above aswell.

gotcha that makes sense on the space. 

 

idk this thing just feels slow running Windows 10 Pro and only acting as a file server. I was afraid that loading up DHCP, Firewall, and VPN server duties would bog it down, definitely not leave enough overhead to run those sandboxes on top with only 4 cores/4 threads...

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Kalm_Traveler1 said:

gotcha that makes sense on the space. 

 

idk this thing just feels slow running Windows 10 Pro and only acting as a file server. I was afraid that loading up DHCP, Firewall, and VPN server duties would bog it down, definitely not leave enough overhead to run those sandboxes on top with only 4 cores/4 threads...

put a hypervisor on that system and give it a shot. None of those services needs much cpu power.