Server requirements suggestions

[slippers_]

 

Hey guys, wondering if you can recommend me some hardware for a server that does multiple things.

I would like it to run a Minecraft server.

I would like to (best case) fold all the time.

Run a couple of VMs.

And maybe do a couple more things such as setting up a PiHole.

 

I looked at the website https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk for some specifications etc, and I thought possibly something with 16 cores was ample enough.

What older compute cards would you guys suggest? Are they better than their consumer counterparts? Which ones could you suggest?

 

I wasn't looking to spend megabucks on this, mainly because I cant. I am accounting about £500? Tell me if this is delusional lol. 

[TheKDub]

For Minecraft, you want the highest single thread performance you can get. Having a ton of cores won't do much good for Minecraft.

 

Is this gonna be for vanilla or modded Minecraft, and with how many players? What's your internet speed?

[myselfolli]

And what do you want to do in "a couple of VMs"? This could make or break your machine...

[slippers_]

2 minutes ago, TheKDub said:

For Minecraft, you want the highest single thread performance you can get. Having a ton of cores won't do much good for Minecraft.

 

Is this gonna be for vanilla or modded Minecraft, and with how many players? What's your internet speed?

Currently it's only for about 5-7 people, this will go up as soon as we can convince others to buy the game haha.

 

Alright, so what sort of processor would you recommend? Or what sort of clock speed would you recommend?

 

My idea would be (since I am running a couple VMs anyways through Hyper V) to dedicate one VM to this server, then have another for folding, then another for any users on my network that would need to use it.

 

Internet speed is about 100Mbps down and about 6Mbps up which I realise isnt excellent, but is playable when hosting on my desktop. 

Currently unmodded MC. 

[slippers_]

3 minutes ago, myselfolli said:

And what do you want to do in "a couple of VMs"? This could make or break your machine...

Yea I understand, depending on the CPU loadout, I would likely dedicate 2-4 cores with maybe 3 VMs - they would be used for typical home office use, browsing web, youtube playback, things like that. Nothing strenuous. 

[Windows7ge]

If you want to setup a Pi-Hole I would recommend you build an independent system for that. Exampled by LMG it can be done on a cheap single board computer if you don't have much to spend. If you already have a unused lower power computer around then all the better.

 

Reason being if you set your router's DNS to the Pi-hole and you shut this server off (speaking of which what OS were you thinking of going with?) and trust me you will need to take this offline for maintenance, your whole home will effectively lose internet.

 

Now technically you can configure a secondary or tertiary DNS and point it to your ISP, CloudFlare, Google, etc for while the Pi-hole is offline but the application makes building an independent box for it appropriate.

 

As for hardware Socket LGA2011 and Intel Xeon E5-2670's are becoming quite cheap. If you're not afraid of buying used you could grab a pair (that'd be 16C/32T total) for about £40~£50/each. A dual socket board for about £120, 128GB of RAM (8x16GB) for £160 so there's ~£380 with enough for a non-redundant PSU and a cheap chassis. Going this route you'd have to save up for those GPU's but it'd give you 16 cores to play with and more than enough RAM to start.

[slippers_]

11 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

If you want to setup a Pi-Hole I would recommend you build an independent system for that. Exampled by LMG it can be done on a cheap single board computer if you don't have much to spend. If you already have a unused lower power computer around then all the better.

 

Reason being if you set your router's DNS to the Pi-hole and you shut this server off (speaking of which what OS were you thinking of going with?) and trust me you will need to take this offline for maintenance, your whole home will effectively lose internet.

 

Now technically you can configure a secondary or tertiary DNS and point it to your ISP, CloudFlare, Google, etc for while the Pi-hole is offline but the application makes building an independent box for it appropriate.

 

As for hardware Socket LGA2011 and Intel Xeon E5-2670's are becoming quite cheap. If you're not afraid of buying used you could grab a pair (that'd be 16C/32T total) for about £40~£50/each. A dual socket board for about £120, 128GB of RAM (8x16GB) for £160 so there's ~£380 with enough for a non-redundant PSU and a cheap chassis. Going this route you'd have to save up for those GPU's but it'd give you 16 cores to play with and more than enough RAM to start.

Yeah alright I'll have a look into that -  I saw the video, hence me wanting to do it on this machine!

I'll have a look at those CPUs you suggested. 

What would you recommend in terms of the GPUs? I watched the recent Craft Computing video on his K20 Tesla's and fancied myself a couple of older gen Tesla's maybe? But then I dont know if thats 'better' than just going older gen consumer cards...

Thanks for the tips!

 

edit: I was thinking of running Windows Server 2016 with Hyper V for the VMs 

[Windows7ge]

10 minutes ago, slippers_ said:

What would you recommend in terms of the GPUs? I watched the recent Craft Computing video on his K20 Tesla's and fancied myself a couple of older gen Tesla's maybe? But then I dont know if thats 'better' than just going older gen consumer cards...

Unfortunately that's a little out of my realm of expertise. My only knowledge on fairly older cards is they come with a lot more video memory then their desktop counterparts and I can't say if that will benefit your compute loads. You'll have to research that.

 

I'm still curious as to what OS you're planning to go with.

[slippers_]

59 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

Unfortunately that's a little out of my realm of expertise. My only knowledge on fairly older cards is they come with a lot more video memory then their desktop counterparts and I can't say if that will benefit your compute loads. You'll have to research that.

 

I'm still curious as to what OS you're planning to go with.

Yeah thats mainly why I would go with them over consumer parts - maybe they would come with more cuda cores making the whole folding thing more worthwhile?

Im thinking of Windows Server 2016. 

[Windows7ge]

11 minutes ago, slippers_ said:

Yeah thats mainly why I would go with them over consumer parts - maybe they would come with more cuda cores making the whole folding thing more worthwhile?

I cannot confidently say. The moment I open my mouth knowing that my answer is really just a guess I have is when someone will fly in here screaming "YOU'RE WRONG!" like a ball of flaming thermite. They'd tear me a new a****** and you'd get your answer but I'm kind of satisfied with the one I have so I'm going to opt that you wait for someone who knows or that you research it.

 

I can say if the compute load can take advantage of mass amounts of onboard video memory then it'd give you better results. You'd have to research the projects you want to do work for and see what works better for those projects.

 

20 minutes ago, slippers_ said:

Im thinking of Windows Server 2016.

No Linux? What were you planning to use as a hypervisor? HyperV? VMware workstation?

[slippers_]

11 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

They'd tear me a new a******

Yeah, I understand haha.

A bit of homework for me to look into I suppose.

 

I mean, I know it isnt a great compute card (or really as anything more than a 720p gaming card) but I'm retiring my GTX 750Ti soon, so that could be the first addition to the build.

 

11 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

No Linux? What were you planning to use as a hypervisor? HyperV? VMware workstation?

Really this is only because I already have a bit of experience with Windows Server, I would almost certainly find any excuse to have Linux VM on there though.

For the hypervisor I was thinking of HyperV, again, because I have had some experience with it, seemed super simple to set up.

 

The E5 2670 looks like a winner though, just need to find a not-so-obscure motherboard that fits in semi standard mounts and I'm good to go!

 

Thanks for your help. 

[Windows7ge]

33 minutes ago, slippers_ said:

Really this is only because I already have a bit of experience with Windows Server, I would almost certainly find any excuse to have Linux VM on there though.

For the hypervisor I was thinking of HyperV, again, because I have had some experience with it, seemed super simple to set up.

 

The E5 2670 looks like a winner though, just need to find a not-so-obscure motherboard that fits in semi standard mounts and I'm good to go!

 

Thanks for your help. 

Well, start with what you know. If it doesn't work out for you consider PROXMOX(free). If that doesn't do it consider Linux running QEMU+virt-manager(free). Both solutions should yield good results. If those don't do anything for you you can look into UnRAID(not free). It's suppose to be very user friendly. What it costs may be worth it's ease of use.

 

From my own experience with HyperV for CPU compute applications it has massive overhead. I can't say how GPU compute will be affected (or lack thereof) but I guess you'll just have to do a comparison test and find out.

[TheKDub]

6 hours ago, slippers_ said:

Currently it's only for about 5-7 people, this will go up as soon as we can convince others to buy the game haha.

 

Alright, so what sort of processor would you recommend? Or what sort of clock speed would you recommend?

 

My idea would be (since I am running a couple VMs anyways through Hyper V) to dedicate one VM to this server, then have another for folding, then another for any users on my network that would need to use it.

 

Internet speed is about 100Mbps down and about 6Mbps up which I realise isnt excellent, but is playable when hosting on my desktop. 

Currently unmodded MC. 

Yikes. 6Mb/s isn't much, especially for hosting. Minecraft servers do much more uploading than they do downloading. If you've got a data cap, keep data usage in mind. It's easy for even a small server to tear through several hundred GB of data in a month if people are on it constantly (Though with your current size, it probably wouldn't total to more than 100-200GB or so in a month with only a few hours of usage per day). You'll probably be able to have around 14-18 people on the server before you start running into network issues. Even fewer if you decide to run a modded server or have other stuff going on in the background using up your upload bandwidth.

 

If you can find an old Dell Optiplex 790 with an i7 2600 for cheap, that'd likely work fine. I'd just make sure to put an SSD in it for faster loading times.

If you're more of looking for building something, check out older used xeons, just bear in mind that you'll need at least a cheap dedicated GPU to get video output, unless the chip you get has integrated graphics.

 

Try finding benchmarks for the CPUs you look at for single thread performance. I'd try to make sure they're at least as good as an i7 2600.

[slippers_]

On 9/3/2019 at 5:32 PM, Windows7ge said:

Well, start with what you know. If it doesn't work out for you consider PROXMOX(free). If that doesn't do it consider Linux running QEMU+virt-manager(free). Both solutions should yield good results. If those don't do anything for you you can look into UnRAID(not free). It's suppose to be very user friendly. What it costs may be worth it's ease of use.

 

From my own experience with HyperV for CPU compute applications it has massive overhead. I can't say how GPU compute will be affected (or lack thereof) but I guess you'll just have to do a comparison test and find out.

I'll definitely explore all these options. Thanks for the tips.

 

On 9/3/2019 at 8:33 PM, TheKDub said:

Yikes. 6Mb/s isn't much,

Haha. About standard for the average home internet broadband package in the UK

I have been able to do it fine with about 3 people being hosted on my PC, performance was good enough. 

The data cap stuff isn't a worry as I don't have one.

 

On 9/3/2019 at 8:33 PM, TheKDub said:

If you can find an old Dell Optiplex 790 with an i7 2600 for cheap, that'd likely work fine. I'd just make sure to put an SSD in it for faster loading times.

If you're more of looking for building something, check out older used xeons, just bear in mind that you'll need at least a cheap dedicated GPU to get video output, unless the chip you get has integrated graphics.

 

Try finding benchmarks for the CPUs you look at for single thread performance. I'd try to make sure they're at least as good as an i7 2600.

I'll keep single threaded performance in mind, I think @TheKDub said this as well. 

I think I would want to build a server with greater than 8 cores, as running more than one Virtual machine with a quad core is going to be a struggle.

Thanks for the pointers, I'll keep on the lookout for 2600-esque Xeon CPUs.