Home Server for 20-40 VMs

Soldato
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20-40 vm's is a lot for a home setup. Most SME's run less than that!

Those vm's are going to be site idle a lot of the time, so a thread ripper seems like monstrous overkill. If you're working on VDI like basis, Vmware suggest a 10:1 vcpu per core ratio as a starting point (reality is more like 6:1 in real world).

I'd value resilience over raw power any day of the week; have you considered a 2 node robo vsan instead? Exta node for resilience with shared storage. Would also be a bit more fun to play with than a big standard esxi host.

For the price of that homebuild server, you could get 2 or even 3 proper tower servers that would be more suitable.
 
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Associate
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Channel Islands
What would the VMs actually be doing - just sitting there with a single browser tab open?
If you can run Linux VMs then you might find you could get away with a lot less memory per machine - maybe as little as 1GB per machine.
Yeah will just be that primarily. So Linux certainly an option. Would allow me to put half the RAM in.

I don't get it, really.
Are you doing it to provide your whole extended family a virtual machine? I really can't imagine what you could possibly be thinking.
 
Associate
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I think that whole thread is hilarious. Thanks for that :)

HUGE machine, VMs, piles of memory for 40 web pages. ROFL. yeah *3 GB of RAM per webpage* even chrome can't do that!

I ran several websites in a VPS with 128 *MB* of ram for years, all of them with quite a few users.
 
Associate
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How are you going to manage 40 vms - how do you intend managing / interacting with 40 chrome instances? This in my view is screaming for some sort of sandboxing like tool - docker container, with centralised management. Windows Sandbox may be another easier tool.
 
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