Looking for recommendations

AFoxNamedXyler · November 29, 2019

Hello,

I'm looking for recommendations to upgrade my current unRAID setup.

Currently, I'm using a Xeon E3 1245-V5 CPU (Skylake based 4 core 8 thread Xeon CPU). It has 32GB of U-ECC RAM, and using an Asus WS motherboard with the C-621 (or something like that) Chipset.

What I wish to upgrade to, is a 14 to 16 core CPU, and 64GB of RAM minimum. But I don't know what CPU I should get.

I need a CPU that isn't too expensive (I know 16 core CPUs aren't cheap, I'm saying I don't wanna spend more than 1200$ on the CPU alone if possible). I'm not fussy over ECC Ram, I can omit it if I need to. I was thinking of getting the new 10940X from Intel, for the 14 cores, and lowish price, but I'm not so sure anymore after seeing reviews of the 10980XE. I'd like to use a CPU that can do at least quad channel RAM, to be able to upgrade easier down the line with more RAM, but I haven't fully ruled out the AMD 3950x.

The reason I want to upgrade, is I want to do more virtual machines in unRAID. Currently running 4 of them, 3 Ubuntu and 1 Windows 2012 R2, and all three Ubuntu Servers are sharing the same core and thread... Which is not ideal at all.

Electronics Wizardy · November 29, 2019

How much cpu usage do you see? Its normal to have vms share cpus cores, and is very common for hosting servers. Your vms probably won't be near their max performance most of the time. Id just let them share cores until you have a performance issue.

Im personally a sucker for older dual xeons as they can hold much more ram(>1tb often), and if you get the ones that use ddr3r, its cheap ram too(like 1/4 of the price of ddr4 ecc)

id also look at the first and second gen threadrippers, There cheaper now, esp for the 8 and 12 cores(you don't seem to need the cpu power), and have the better ram and io.

Id also look at a better hypervisor like proxmox, esxi, hyper-v, and xcp-ng. They all over much more features for hosting vms than unraid.

AFoxNamedXyler · November 30, 2019

16 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

How much cpu usage do you see? Its normal to have vms share cpus cores, and is very common for hosting servers. Your vms probably won't be near their max performance most of the time. Id just let them share cores until you have a performance issue.

Im personally a sucker for older dual xeons as they can hold much more ram(>1tb often), and if you get the ones that use ddr3r, its cheap ram too(like 1/4 of the price of ddr4 ecc)

id also look at the first and second gen threadrippers, There cheaper now, esp for the 8 and 12 cores(you don't seem to need the cpu power), and have the better ram and io.

Id also look at a better hypervisor like proxmox, esxi, hyper-v, and xcp-ng. They all over much more features for hosting vms than unraid.

While I gave you best answer, I'll tell you why I want to increase my core counts and such.

Right now, I'm more looking to increase ram before I increase core count, but I might as well have more cores than I can think of using, because I don't know what my future plans will be.

My cpu utilization right now is hovering between 30 and 50% when I'm not doing much, but the 2 cores and 4 threads I have assigned to my windows server instance can hover into the 60% utilization if I'm running all the game servers.

What I'm thoroughly impressed about though, is just how efficient that little processor is. The whole system draws so little power, my UPS is barely under load, and can keep it going for half an hour without power despite it being just a 750VA unit.

The reason I've stuck with unRAID despite there being better options, is because I do like that it already is a good file sharing server, and docker services were easy to do. That, and I haven't had any issues with it, so I'm not rushing to replace it. And while I do work with ESXi at work, and it does have more options and such... I would have to figure a way to do RAID 5 and rebuild all the data that's in the 3TB I have right now, and I'm planning on adding a new 3tb disk to my array, so it will total 6TB of storage. So while I do like ESXi, I'm gonna stick with unraid for now.

I think I'll give the TR 2950x a try. While yes, you're right, I don't need that much cpu power, having it isn't gonna hurt me, especially if I plan to do way more with this guy.