What Windows Version To Use?

[Opencircuit74]

So I just bought 2 Xeon X5670s off of ebay and a dell poweredge r710 motherboard, to run 2 windows VMs that can also game. I would like to know the best operating system for this setup. It will be using 32 gigs of ddr3-1333 ECC RAM, and 2 GTX 1050 Tis. (Note, please don't rant on me about the hardware, a lot of thought went into this) Would I be able to install windows 10 pro or do I need a different OS? Thanks!

[TheCherryKing]

7 minutes ago, Opencircuit74 said:

So I just bought 2 Xeon X5670s off of ebay and a dell poweredge r710 motherboard, to run 2 windows VMs that can also game. I would like to know the best operating system for this setup. It will be using 32 gigs of ddr3-1333 ECC RAM, and 2 GTX 1050 Tis. (Note, please don't rant on me about the hardware, a lot of thought went into this) Would I be able to install windows 10 pro or do I need a different OS? Thanks!

Any version of Windows 7 or later should work as long as it is the professional version or higher. Home editions of Windows only support one CPU per system. 

[moltencrystal]

if you can get it server 2016 data center is great as a host with unlimited hyper-v instances, with win 10 pro only supporting 2 so no more room within hyper-v, if you are planning to use it

 

another pro to server 2016 is its similarities to win 10 

[TurbulentWinds]

I would use Linux for something like this . . . . or WINDOWS 98 

[Opencircuit74]

15 minutes ago, TurbulentWinds said:

I would use Linux for something like this . . . . or WINDOWS 98 

The xeons were made in... 2010, and are basically the same as the i7 980x. Linux, might work, but remember, I want two Windows VMs. I might try to get windows server 2016, but I might not be able to if the cost is too high. Thanks for the suggestions everyone!

[mariushm]

Windows 2003 R2 would be perfectly fine for this.

 

If you need something newer, Windows 7 I think will work with 2 cpu socket motherboards but it has to be Professional, Enterprise or Ultimate editions. Home versions won't support two cpu sockets (they'll probably run but use only one cpu)

 

From there on, you have WIndows 2008, Windows 2012 will work (one of my dedicated servers uses Windows 2012 R2 and it works perfectly fine) ... you don't need the latest for that old hardware, there's nothing in the system that would require a very new operating system to be supported.

 

[TurbulentWinds]

3 hours ago, Opencircuit74 said:

The xeons were made in... 2010, and are basically the same as the i7 980x. Linux, might work, but remember, I want two Windows VMs. I might try to get windows server 2016, but I might not be able to if the cost is too high. Thanks for the suggestions everyone!

Wait, so why do you need windows VMs? While Linux doesn't do as well in games as Windows, the overhead of the Windows VMs compared to a lightweight Linux distro should give Linux the advantage in this case. If you decide to try it, please let me know cause I'm actually interested in seeing which would work better.

[Opencircuit74]

31 minutes ago, TurbulentWinds said:

Wait, so why do you need windows VMs? While Linux doesn't do as well in games as Windows, the overhead of the Windows VMs compared to a lightweight Linux distro should give Linux the advantage in this case. If you decide to try it, please let me know cause I'm actually interested in seeing which would work better.

I need two Windows VMs because they are very familiar, and more supported by games. Sure I can try linux, once I get the system running (a couple weeks or so) I'll get those results. Any particular benchmarks or anything you want to test?

[TurbulentWinds]

20 hours ago, Opencircuit74 said:

I need two Windows VMs because they are very familiar, and more supported by games. Sure I can try linux, once I get the system running (a couple weeks or so) I'll get those results. Any particular benchmarks or anything you want to test?

I think just some frame counts in a couple of games should be fine. In raw benchmarks, Linux is gonna be faster but in games I'm not so sure. 

[TurbulentWinds]