Multipurpose virtualization server/workbench build

[romogo17]

I'm looking to build a multipurpose virtualization server/workbench.

I want to use it as my main developer machine but I would also like to make use of virtualization for testing, deployment and learning purposes.

It would be nice if I could use it for some casual gaming as well, although nothing super fancy since I want it mainly for developing and virtualization

 

Can someone please help me with the hardware I should aim to buy?

 

I understand you can buy some refurbished hardware (servers) cheap on eBay but I'm a little concerned about the noise since I will be having the machine near me.

I wouldn't have any problem buying used hardware as long as it is really helpful.

Should I look for a dual Xeon build to help my virtualization requirements?  How much RAM should I be looking for?

I'm open to read recommendations from you guys about what should I do!

 

Budget: Ideally under $1,000 since I have to factor importing taxes and shipping to my country

No peripherals required (monitor, keyboard/mouse) since I already have them.

[leadeater]

Your best option is probably just using the Hyper-V role in Windows 10. It will do everything you need and you can use the main OS for your day to day stuff like development and games without having to worry about the draw backs of virtualization and the very very few hypervisors that can do GPU & USB passthrough that works correctly for gaming.

 

Far as dual socket versus single socket that entirely depends on how many VMs you plan on running, don't forget VMs can share CPU cores/threads perfectly fine and you just shut them down when gaming.

[fjdhdhcyfhf]

25 minutes ago, romogo17 said:

I understand you can buy some refurbished hardware (servers) cheap on eBay but I'm a little concerned about the noise since I will be having the machine near me.

servers are noisy, up to 6000rpm fans. They are also thrashed until they die, unless you score one from a liquidation sale.

26 minutes ago, romogo17 said:

Should I look for a dual Xeon build to help my virtualization requirements?  How much RAM should I be looking for?

Anything with at least 6 cores from AMD-FX to Xeon will do virt & software compiling. More cores is better. At least 16GB of ram. Look at linux kernel compile times to compare the second hand options you find. There used to be a page on openbenchmarking.org but it seems to be down

 

 

 

[romogo17]

20 hours ago, leadeater said:

Your best option is probably just using the Hyper-V role in Windows 10. It will do everything you need and you can use the main OS for your day to day stuff like development and games without having to worry about the draw backs of virtualization and the very very few hypervisors that can do GPU & USB passthrough that works correctly for gaming.

 

Far as dual socket versus single socket that entirely depends on how many VMs you plan on running, don't forget VMs can share CPU cores/threads perfectly fine and you just shut them down when gaming.

I intended to run around 7-10 VMs, for deployment and hosting learning as well as other utilities I might think in a future.

 

Would a build like this comfortably fulfill my requirements?

 

PCPartPicker part list: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/CR439W
Price breakdown by merchant: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/CR439W/by_merchant/

CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2670 2.6GHz 8-Core Processor  ($161.60) 
CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2670 2.6GHz 8-Core Processor  ($161.60) 
CPU Cooler: be quiet! Dark Rock 2 57.9 CFM Fluid Dynamic Bearing CPU Cooler  ($47.90 @ Newegg Marketplace) 
CPU Cooler: be quiet! Dark Rock 2 57.9 CFM Fluid Dynamic Bearing CPU Cooler  ($47.90 @ Newegg Marketplace) 
Motherboard: Asus Z9PA-D8 ATX Dual-CPU LGA2011 Motherboard  ($338.93 @ Newegg) 
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LP 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory  ($89.99 @ Corsair) 
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LP 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory  ($89.99 @ Corsair) 
Storage: Western Digital Red 2TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($82.88 @ OutletPC) 
Video Card: Zotac GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB Video Card  ($182.05 @ Amazon) 
Case: Fractal Design Define S w/Window ATX Mid Tower Case  ($79.99 @ NCIX US) 
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA G2 650W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  ($88.89 @ OutletPC) 
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro OEM 64-bit  ($138.88 @ OutletPC) 
Wireless Network Adapter: TP-Link TL-WDN4800 PCI-Express x1 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi Adapter  ($34.98 @ Amazon) 
Total: $1545.58
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-04-14 19:01 EDT-0400

 

Or is it something i-series-oriented more appropriate such as:

 

PCPartPicker part list: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/gtKQYr
Price breakdown by merchant: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/gtKQYr/by_merchant/

CPU: Intel Core i7-7700K 4.2GHz Quad-Core Processor  ($338.44 @ OutletPC) 
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-U9B SE2 37.9 CFM CPU Cooler  ($79.85 @ OutletPC) 
Motherboard: Asus MAXIMUS IX HERO ATX LGA1151 Motherboard  ($214.99 @ SuperBiiz) 
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR4-2133 Memory  ($231.99 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Western Digital Red 2TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($82.88 @ OutletPC) 
Video Card: Asus GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 6GB Strix Video Card  ($294.88 @ OutletPC) 
Case: Fractal Design Define R4 w/Window (Black Pearl) ATX Mid Tower Case  ($109.88 @ OutletPC) 
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA G2 550W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  ($79.79 @ OutletPC) 
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro OEM 64-bit  ($138.88 @ OutletPC) 
Wireless Network Adapter: TP-Link TL-WDN4800 PCI-Express x1 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi Adapter  ($34.98 @ Amazon) 
Total: $1606.56
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-04-14 19:05 EDT-0400

 

 

Would you please offer me some insight? I'm not very used to picking hardware. Thanks in advance

[leadeater]

@romogo17

A build closer to the first one you listed would suite what you need best. You probably don't need to go dual socket or you could start with a single CPU in a dual socket motherboard so you can get a better GPU, depends how much importance you place on a GPU/gaming.

 

I've gone with the Intel E5-2667v2 as that is a workstation variant with much high clock rates which is helpful for compiling code, GPU accelerated tasks and gaming.

 

PCPartPicker part list: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/PqYY7h
Price breakdown by merchant: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/PqYY7h/by_merchant/

CPU Cooler: Corsair H80 92.0 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler  ($109.99 @ Corsair) 
Motherboard: Supermicro X9SRA ATX LGA2011 Motherboard  ($283.93 @ Amazon) 
Memory: G.Skill Ares Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR3-2400 Memory  ($203.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: Western Digital Red 2TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($82.88 @ OutletPC) 
Video Card: Zotac GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 6GB Mini Video Card  ($219.99 @ Amazon) 
Case: Fractal Design Define S w/Window ATX Mid Tower Case  ($79.99 @ NCIX US) 
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA G2 650W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  ($88.89 @ OutletPC) 
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro OEM 64-bit  ($138.88 @ OutletPC) 
Wireless Network Adapter: TP-Link TL-WDN4800 PCI-Express x1 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi Adapter  ($34.98 @ Amazon) 
Other:  Intel Xeon E5-2667V2 ($124.00)
Total: $1367.52
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-04-14 20:31 EDT-0400

 

[TapfererToaster]

Sorry, if i missed it, but after looking the part list over, i did not spot any SSD?

I would strongly suggest one or two to store the VMs. Running the host OS and up to 7 guests on a single WD Red will be a tight bottleneck.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, TapfererToaster said:

Sorry, if i missed it, but after looking the part list over, i did not spot any SSD?

I would strongly suggest one or two to store the VMs. Running the host OS and up to 7 guests on a single WD Red will be a tight bottleneck.

True, does depend on the actual I/O load of the VMs. Didn't put one in as the preferred budget was actually under $1000 and it's already $370 more than that.

[romogo17]

@leadeater @TapfererToaster

 

I modified the build to fit some of your recommendations:

 

PCPartPicker part list: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/cHmZD8
Price breakdown by merchant: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/cHmZD8/by_merchant/

CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2670 2.6GHz 8-Core Processor  ($160.60) 
CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2670 2.6GHz 8-Core Processor  ($160.60) 
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler  ($24.88 @ OutletPC) 
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler  ($24.88 @ OutletPC) 
Motherboard: ASRock EP2C602-4L/D16 SSI EEB Dual-CPU LGA2011 Motherboard  ($304.99 @ SuperBiiz) 
Memory: Corsair Vengeance Pro 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR3-1866 Memory  ($164.99 @ Corsair) 
Storage: Sandisk SSD PLUS 480GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($129.99 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($65.48 @ PCM) 
Video Card: Zotac GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 6GB Mini Video Card  ($219.99 @ Amazon) 
Case: Phanteks Enthoo Pro ATX Full Tower Case  ($99.99 @ Amazon) 
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA G2 750W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  ($99.99 @ Amazon) 
Wireless Network Adapter: TP-Link TL-WDN4800 PCI-Express x1 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi Adapter  ($34.98 @ Amazon) 
Total: $1491.36
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-04-15 11:34 EDT-0400

 

I added an SSD as recommended and changed the GPU

 

15 hours ago, leadeater said:

Other:  Intel Xeon E5-2667V2 ($124.00)

I couldn't find this processor at that price. Would you mind telling me where I could find it?

 

Thanks

[leadeater]

9 hours ago, romogo17 said:

@leadeater @TapfererToaster

 

I couldn't find this processor at that price. Would you mind telling me where I could find it?

 

Thanks

I got it off of ebay, the link to the auction is on the PC Part Picker item.

[ARikozuM]

16 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I got it off of ebay, the link to the auction is on the PC Part Picker item.

Aren't you skirting the "no Ebay links" policy?

[leadeater]

3 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

Aren't you skirting the "no Ebay links" policy?

Yes and no, here in the Servers and NAS section I take a much different approach to that rule as buying used server parts is the most common and cost effective, not to mention I directly post ebay links anyway. Didn't in this case since pc part picker was being used.

 

Self promotion of own auctions will be removed and anything suspect in nature will be pointed out by me and many of the other helpful members that frequently use this section, @tt2468 @Electronics Wizardy @KuJoe @Erkel @Mikensan @brwainer @scottyseng just to name few .

[ARikozuM]

5 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Yes and no, here in the Servers and NAS section I take a much different approach to that rule as buying used server parts is the most common and cost effective, not to mention I directly post ebay links anyway. Didn't in this case since pc part picker was being used.

Nice to know that the standards are flexible for positive means depending on the circumstance.

[Erkel]

Anything modern with a decent CPU will be fine, provided that it has plenty of memory slots, 8+

 

RAM is the most important thing for virtualisation, if you are paging your system may as well be dead.  If you are running disk intensive workloads, also ensure you have the load spread across a few disks, or SSD caching etc.

 

Maybe look around locally,  See what you can get in terms of old corporate e-waste.  Due to the fact the server market and intel has not really gone anywhere in the last 7-8 years, stuff of that vintage is still fine.  I just put in a couple of 2010 vintage Dell R710's with 144GB of RAM and they are fine and would beat most new generic PC stuff in a heavy virtualization environment.       With a bit of time and effort you maybe able to pickup something like this for under $1K

 

Dell T710 or similar

Server Chassis with dual power supplies and motherboard.

8+ cores of Xeon CPU

~100GB of DDR3 ECC RAM

1-2TB of Storage on a battery backed raid card.

 

 

If you want some serious kit that is cheap it really comes down to time and getting a handle on the clearance and e-waste side of the industry.

The only things I normally buy new are:

Monitors

SSD's,

RAID cards if in mission critical NAS boxes (Storage is the only thing that truely needs to be reliable. everything else is disposable.)

Database server builds where speed is the only thing that matters.

[samiscool51]

On 14/04/2017 at 0:05 PM, leadeater said:

Your best option is probably just using the Hyper-V role in Windows 10

it requires pro and their are free and better options like VmWare ESX 6.0 (i think thats the free version) and linux distros

and it also depends on how many systems you want to have

this is how i usually do something like this\

virtual system: 2 cores, 4GB RAM and a 32 GB harddrive

number of systems (depends on use case): 2-4

a 10 core, 24 GB RAM and 256 GB RAID array (for virtual systems) system would be able to do this use case

but if you are just doing 2 systems, halve the numbers and that should do you (excpet the core number, thats would be 6)

 

edit: added number of cores for halved system

[leadeater]

23 minutes ago, samiscool51 said:

it requires pro and their are free and better options like VmWare ESX 6.0 (i think thats the free version) and linux distros

and it also depends on how many systems you want to have

this is how i usually do something like this\

virtual system: 2 cores, 4GB RAM and a 32 GB harddrive

number of systems (depends on use case): 2-4

a 10 core, 24 GB RAM and 256 GB RAID array (for virtual systems) system would be able to do this use case

but if you are just doing 2 systems, halve the numbers and that should do you (excpet the core number, thats would be 6)

 

edit: added number of cores for halved system

Hyper-V in this case is a better choice as the primary task that is needed is a development workstation that can sometimes game. If ESXi were to be used another computer would be needed as you can't directly use an ESXi server as a workstation where as you can with Hyper-V.

 

Also trying to game using a VM is generally a bad idea so that is another positive to Hyper-V as you would do that on the base OS.

 

Even though I am a VMware user Hyper-V is still an extremely capable hypervisor, also there is a free edition called Windows Hyper-V Server which makes it a rather attractive option since there are features in Hyper-V that are free but not so in ESXi. This is beyond the context of this thread though since you can't use that Windows edition as a workstation.

[sWORDs]

11 hours ago, leadeater said:

Hyper-V in this case is a better choice as the primary task that is needed is a development workstation that can sometimes game. If ESXi were to be used another computer would be needed as you can't directly use an ESXi server as a workstation where as you can with Hyper-V.

 

Also trying to game using a VM is generally a bad idea so that is another positive to Hyper-V as you would do that on the base OS.

 

Even though I am a VMware user Hyper-V is still an extremely capable hypervisor, also there is a free edition called Windows Hyper-V Server which makes it a rather attractive option since there are features in Hyper-V that are free but not so in ESXi. This is beyond the context of this thread though since you can't use that Windows edition as a workstation.

While I agree that Hyper-V might be simpler, using ESXi as a (or multiple!) workstation(s) isn't a bad idea either. You can use an AMD Graphics card and USB controller and pass them through (IOMMU/VT-d) to the VM, allowing you to directly use the video outputs (HDMI/VGA/DP, etc) and keyboard and mouse.

Even Intel graphics of Haswell and newer can be passed through, but I don't know if the display outputs work (only helped other getting VT-d working with Intel Graphics remotely, never had the chance to test the physical outputs). nVidia Graphics is possible too (with outputs), but is only easy to do with most (but not all!) Quadro Cards, Geforce is a lot harder as you need to trick the card to think it's not running in a VM.

 

A 3rd option is to use a real graphics card without the outputs and stream H264 to a very lightweight device, which works surprisingly well.

 

On the other things mentioned in this topic, frequency is more important than cores. So for a home user running 7-8 machines a 7700K could outperform a dual E5 2670, depending on the simultaneous workload. It's not that likely that you're able to max out a 7700K with most workloads.

If you do, then it probably involves IO too, and if you've got high IO on multiple machines you really need a good NVMe drive (Intel 750/P3700, Samsung 960 Pro), or (less prefered) a SAS SSD. Don't look at the other NVMe drives as they're not better then a SATA SSD when writing for more then 5-7 minutes (most dropping even sooner), also don't look at nearly all reviews that show that a NVMe drive is useless, while they are absolutely right for single consumer workloads, it's a whole other story when you run multiple workloads or look at server workloads. Also SAS/SATA RAID is not a great idea, splitting drives across machines is definitely better.

 

Now if you are going for the Hyper-V option (not yet possible with ESXi probably till Naples is released), Ryzen might be a serious option to consider. It has the best of both worlds, many cores (8) and high frequency (3-4GHz), while still affordable and easy to (silently) cool. Something like a 1700 overclocked to 3.8 or 3.9 (make sure it's 100% stable and survives a 24h burn test) or a 1800X and Intel 750 (or Samsung 960 Pro, but the Intel is even greater) would make one of the fastest systems you could build today.

[sWORDs]

12 hours ago, samiscool51 said:

it requires pro and their are free and better options like VmWare ESX 6.0 (i think thats the free version) and linux distros

and it also depends on how many systems you want to have

this is how i usually do something like this\

virtual system: 2 cores, 4GB RAM and a 32 GB harddrive

number of systems (depends on use case): 2-4

a 10 core, 24 GB RAM and 256 GB RAID array (for virtual systems) system would be able to do this use case

but if you are just doing 2 systems, halve the numbers and that should do you (excpet the core number, thats would be 6)

 

edit: added number of cores for halved system

You can run a lot more on a 10 core system, with dual core VM's. Even for high CAD usage a 1:1 ratio is recommended (so 5 VM's), but for most workloads you can easily run 3:1 (so 15 VM's). And those ratios are for different users, in this use case there is a single user, so going a lot higher should be fine.

 

Now on a quad or dual core system the story is a bit different as the hypervisor needs CPU too. But for homelabs most people use quad cores with less frequency then the earlier mentioned 7700K and never max out their CPU, before the jump to DDR4 (64GB with 4 slots) the 32GB max memory on the 1151 platform was usually the bottleneck.

[leadeater]

5 hours ago, sWORDs said:

While I agree that Hyper-V might be simpler, using ESXi as a (or multiple!) workstation(s) isn't a bad idea either. You can use an AMD Graphics card and USB controller and pass them through (IOMMU/VT-d) to the VM, allowing you to directly use the video outputs (HDMI/VGA/DP, etc) and keyboard and mouse.

That still isn't a very good option as you still need another computer to actually configure that and if anything goes wrong later down the line you'll need it to diagnose that problem. The primary task of the computer is a developer workstation virtualization is a secondary task but still needs to be good at it, practicality is more important which is why Windows + Hyper-V is what I'm advising. If this was a pure virtualization question I'd be saying use ESXi.

 

Also Hyper-V is just as good as ESXi now so there isn't much of a reason to pick one over the other except for me since I pay for VMUG Advantage so get almost the entire suite of VMware enterprise software for $200 USD a year, worth checking out if you are interested.

 

5 hours ago, sWORDs said:

Now if you are going for the Hyper-V option (not yet possible with ESXi probably till Naples is released), Ryzen might be a serious option to consider.

Ryzen is still a lot more expensive than used Xeons. For example you can get an Intel S5520HC for about $80USD and two L5630's for $10-12USD, you can get better CPUs than that if you need them or even go to a LGA 2011v1 system for not much less.

 

Ryzen is an excellent choice if only new parts were to be looked at but doesn't really stack up when you can get a Intel Xeon E5-2667v2 for $120USD.

[sWORDs]

3 hours ago, leadeater said:

That still isn't a very good option as you still need another computer to actually configure that and if anything goes wrong later down the line you'll need it to diagnose that problem. The primary task of the computer is a developer workstation virtualization is a secondary task but still needs to be good at it, practicality is more important which is why Windows + Hyper-V is what I'm advising. If this was a pure virtualization question I'd be saying use ESXi.

 

Also Hyper-V is just as good as ESXi now so there isn't much of a reason to pick one over the other except for me since I pay for VMUG Advantage so get almost the entire suite of VMware enterprise software for $200 USD a year, worth checking out if you are interested.

 

Ryzen is still a lot more expensive than used Xeons. For example you can get an Intel S5520HC for about $80USD and two L5630's for $10-12USD, you can get better CPUs than that if you need them or even go to a LGA 2011v1 system for not much less.

 

Ryzen is an excellent choice if only new parts were to be looked at but doesn't really stack up when you can get a Intel Xeon E5-2667v2 for $120USD.

_{How do I do multiple quotes in a single post like you did? I'm looking for a raw editor, but I can't find it.}

 

On multiple systems, agreed, not a great idea if it's the only computer in the house.

 

On VMUG, I don't need it as I work for the vendor. 

 

On Ryzen, as I actually have dual and single Xeons in my house (but not next to my desk for the noise), what all my systems lack is CPU frequency and there is no replacement for it. A 5630 doesn't have a all core turbo frequency so will run a 'just' 2.53GHz most of the time and as we're talking about a CPU that's seven years old it will feel sluggish. It's more then twice as slow as a 7700K and while the TDP (80) looks reasonable, if you look at idle power consumption you quickly see why a single 7700K could be a better fit than dual E5630's and might even be cheaper in the long run.

On the 2667 v2, that's a much better deal

[samiscool51]

10 hours ago, sWORDs said:

(bump)

my knowledge on virtualisation isn't' great, but it's enough to get virtual systems going and to fix common problems

funny really, i'm a MCSE yet i'm useless at things that the program went over like virtualisation

[leadeater]

6 hours ago, sWORDs said:

How do I do multiple quotes in a single post like you did? I'm looking for a raw editor, but I can't find it.

Highlight the text you want to quote and a tool-tip will pop up 'Quote this'.

 

6 hours ago, sWORDs said:

On Ryzen, as I actually have dual and single Xeons in my house (but not next to my desk for the noise), what all my systems lack is CPU frequency and there is no replacement for it. A 5630 doesn't have a all core turbo frequency so will run a 'just' 2.53GHz most of the time and as we're talking about a CPU that's seven years old it will feel sluggish.

I use the L5630 which are 40W TDP for that reason but I wouldn't recommend this CPU for a workstation, for those I go with the the likes of the 2667/2687W etc which are the high frequency workstation Xeons or just use a normal consumer CPU. Really depends on what someone is after, those L5630's make great general purpose virtual hosts or a NAS system.

 

Even though the LGA1366 platform is 7 years old the performance of Xeons haven't improved a great deal per core so somebody at home hosting a plex server, web server, AD etc is never going to notice any performance difference. If you are going to GPU offload you will notice that but as you said that has more to do with frequency than the architecture performance itself.

 

I do agree though that LGA1366 is very old now and when I find a common and good LGA2011 motherboard on ebay I'll start recommending that or newer exclusively, CPU prices have come way down recently as the big hosting providers are now disposing of servers from the generation and so are a lot of businesses (4/5 year replacement cycle). At work we are about to replace 40 of our HP hosts of that generation, which will all get refurbished and sold by our e-waste company like always. We're also blocked from buying them which sucks. 

 

Any system limited to 4 cores is something I won't recommend unless only few VMs are required, like 3, since performance starts to get very rough after that. Speaking from a primary workstation perspective as those VMs while running will give a noticeable performance decrease.

 

Also for a dedicated server, not what this thread is about, I wouldn't advise buying new parts ever not when there are so many perfectly functional complete server systems and parts on ebay for less than the top end Ryzen CPU or HDET Intel CPUs. It just doesn't make any sense to do so in that situation, you do buy new HDDs/SSDs of course.

 

I actually have 4 dual socket S5520HC + 2xL5630 servers and an IBM x3500 M4 in my home lab and performance wise they are totally fine, even the one that hosts my all SSD array that runs 20Gb to my workstation.

[romogo17]

On 4/18/2017 at 5:31 AM, sWORDs said:

Now if you are going for the Hyper-V option (not yet possible with ESXi probably till Naples is released), Ryzen might be a serious option to consider. It has the best of both worlds, many cores (8) and high frequency (3-4GHz), while still affordable and easy to (silently) cool. Something like a 1700 overclocked to 3.8 or 3.9 (make sure it's 100% stable and survives a 24h burn test) or a 1800X and Intel 750 (or Samsung 960 Pro, but the Intel is even greater) would make one of the fastest systems you could build today.

Actually, I had strongly started to consider Ryzen for my requirements as, like you said, offers the "best of both worlds" for my requirements, which @leadeater well explained: 

On 4/18/2017 at 10:53 AM, leadeater said:

primary task of the computer is a developer workstation virtualization is a secondary task but still needs to be good at it

Nevertheless, I was a little confused by this:

 

On 4/18/2017 at 5:31 AM, sWORDs said:

On the other things mentioned in this topic, frequency is more important than cores. So for a home user running 7-8 machines a 7700K could outperform a dual E5 2670, depending on the simultaneous workload. It's not that likely that you're able to max out a 7700K with most workloads.

 

Should I be looking for a higher number of relatively fast cores (e.g.: Ryzen 1800X, https://pcpartpicker.com/list/BwRWCy) or should I be looking for a higher frequency (like a 7700K, https://pcpartpicker.com/list/gtKQYr) considering my requirements:

 

1. The primary task of the computer is a developer workstation (fast and good at multitasking)
2. Being able to run several VMs for testing, deployment, etc. (around 5 VMs)
3. Have the ability to game casually and comfortably

Thanks,

 

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, romogo17 said:

Actually, I had strongly started to consider Ryzen for my requirements as, like you said, offers the "best of both worlds" for my requirements, which @leadeater well explained: 

 

Should I be looking for a higher number of relatively fast cores (e.g.: Ryzen 1800X, https://pcpartpicker.com/list/BwRWCy) or should I be looking for a higher frequency (like a 7700K, https://pcpartpicker.com/list/gtKQYr) considering my requirements:

 

1. The primary task of the computer is a developer workstation (fast and good at multitasking)
2. Being able to run several VMs for testing, deployment, etc. (around 5 VMs)
3. Have the ability to game casually and comfortably

I probably wouldn't go with the price premium of the Ryzen 1800X but both their 6 and 8 core product ranges merit looking in to. Do a quick system build price check and see where it comes out at. Swap out the 1800X for the 1700X and make sure you pick the Ryzen optimized ram which I think is the G.Skill Flare X.

 

Personally in this case I wouldn't go with a 7700K over Ryzen since your desired workloads indicate that the higher number for cores would be of a significant benefit.

 

My only worry is that we are significantly over your original price indication of $1000, but if your fine with spending more that is completely up to you.

 

2 hours ago, romogo17 said:

Nevertheless, I was a little confused by this:

What I meant by that is picking the best virtualization platform or parts over everything else isn't what your primary goal was. Not much point building an amazing computer at running virtual machines that you can't sit in front of and directly use as a workstation, basically a just a balancing act.

[sWORDs]

On 22-4-2017 at 3:35 AM, romogo17 said:

Nevertheless, I was a little confused by this:

 

On 18-4-2017 at 1:31 PM, sWORDs said:

On the other things mentioned in this topic, frequency is more important than cores. So for a home user running 7-8 machines a 7700K could outperform a dual E5 2670, depending on the simultaneous workload. It's not that likely that you're able to max out a 7700K with most workloads.

 

Should I be looking for a higher number of relatively fast cores (e.g.: Ryzen 1800X, https://pcpartpicker.com/list/BwRWCy) or should I be looking for a higher frequency (like a 7700K, https://pcpartpicker.com/list/gtKQYr) considering my requirements:

 

1. The primary task of the computer is a developer workstation (fast and good at multitasking)
2. Being able to run several VMs for testing, deployment, etc. (around 5 VMs)
3. Have the ability to game casually and comfortably

What I meant is that frequency (combined with IPC) matters more then cores. So make sure you stay above a certain point. You can have 88 2.1GHz (Quad Xeon E7) cores but it will never feel quick, having 8 cores at 3GHz or higher is probably the sweet swot, but a quick quad (4GHz+) or six (3.5GHz+) core could be enough too and can be quicker for most workloads.