Best PC setup for Multiple VM management - PLEASE HELP!

[Bossmatics]

Hi All,

I'm hoping one of you can help me with my latest venture!

I'm trying to build a very specific machine / Setup and I don't want to get it wrong or waste money where I don't need to.

Recently I have been venturing into the Hyper-V world to virtualise all of my business PCs to one host. I need to be running 10-20 VMs simultaneously 24-7 in order for my business to work correctly and so I have decided it is stressing my current set up a bit and would like to invest in a stand-alone PC to take the load!

Specifically... I would like the machine to be capable of:

- Running up to 20 VMs simultaneously
- Each VM is allocated a dynamic Memory that maxes out at 1GB of RAM and 20 GB on the virtual hard disk.
- It need to be able to run Hyper V ( I had to enable this in my BIOS on my current machine so I assume there are operating systems that don't allow it)
- The machine/setup doesn't have to be used for anything else at all.

I suppose my biggest question is: What exactly do I need here? Do I even need to build an entire PC? or do I just need a few graphics cards in a case? or a hefty CPU? Before I go on to much like I have a clue what I am talking about I built my first PC about two months ago so I am still getting my head around everything, therefore please approach me as if I know nothing/not much at all)

Ideally, I only want to spend about £400-500 but if I can get it cheaper GREAT or if it is more expensive be please be straight with me so I can dig deeper...It is my livelihood after all.

PLEASE HELP!

 

[Bossmatics]

20 VMs is going to need a hefty core count and RAM at the very least, so think Ryzen 2600/2700 or Intel equivalent and 32gb of RAM. Those two components alone are going to eat most, if not all of your budget so you really need to decide what you want to do as you're going to have to compromise somewhere I reckon.

Do you have existing bits to use?

Let me start by saying thank you for coming back to me.

Unfortunately, other than my monitor, I don't have any existing bits to use. Therefore, It will all have to be from scratch... It seems like you are quite clued up about this and I know I'm asking a lot but would you be able to spec the most cost-effective solution for me that would work? if not I understand buddy! At least this way I can set aside a realistic budget.

If need be I could start with a 10VM solution then futureproof my system soi can upscale it in the future!?

Do you think there could be a Barebones solution that might do the job?

 

[Bossmatics]

I built a lab for exactly this here: https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/home-lab-threadripper-build-thread.18789497/

Running lots of VM's is going to eat cores and memory depending on of course what the machines are doing and anticipated load. Lots of questions and in that budget it's going to be tough, im assuming your running the machine as just a hypervisor so no host windows resources? I think if the answer to anticipated load is anything other than "it's a test lab" and little load then your going to find it impossible to host 25VM's on 400 to £500 of hardware and that's before you consider storage infrastructure, resilience and requirements for uptime.

Can you give us any insight into what the machines are doing?

Further to this, I've now fully read your post and to be honest for your requirements I wouldn't even suggest running it on something like my machine which while easily powerful enough, provides no resiliance (or little) in terms of it's disk infrastructure, power, memory (supports but i'm not running EEC), routing, etc etc etc... and my machine was what I would class as expensive (approx 5k of parts).

To be clear if this is critical business kit then go out and buy a dedicated server from overclockers or HP or somebody like that (HP DL385 would be my go to if i'm honest), if it's something you can afford to go down and spend tons of time messing around with then buy £400 worth of kit and I can promise you it will not be a great experience.

Businesses use servers and hypervisors because they are qualified hardware designed to do the job. Using any consumer grade kit you will have to make concessions.

Hi Vince /BlueCube,

Thanks for coming back to me.

The requirements for the VMs are very little. I operate a social media management company where i manage peoples Linked In for them. I need individual machines to run VPN connections on each VM so the Social media account is operating from a local IP to the customer. The reason why I need an individual machine is that a lot of social media companies will only allow a certain amount of logins from a certain machine. I literally only need Each of them to ruin google chrome constantly soi have complete visibility of every profile on one monitor.

I am a new business without employees. I only allocate 1gb of dynamic RAM to each VM and they run absolutely fine on this. I run 5 simultaneously on my current setup:

ASUS B450 - F STRIX
Ryzen 5 2600x
Asus RX Vega 56 ROG
Corsair 16GB Vengence 2x8gb RAM
SSD 500gb
Seagate 1tb barracuda

This cost me about £800

I'm sure with this I am able to run probably up to 12 if not 15 of these VMs in this state simultaneously but I want this machine to do my normal work on and Game etc.... I suppose my question is can i reduce my current spec in some areas and increase it in other areas IE RAM so i can get a separate machine that is tailored to cater for this scenario specifically. Ideally, it would be great to have some sort of futureproofing in it so in the future i can add more VMs for now about 10-15 would do absolutely fine.

Here is my vision:

Have my Gaming setup ready for me to play on one monitor attached to my normal PC

Then a separate machine points to a large 40-inch monitor (Already purchased) this will have a full display of all my accounts i am managing on it and will allow me to reply to messages and posts as and when they happen.

I understand i could host them elsewhere but i like to have hardware on site for this kind of thing.

 

[Bossmatics]

Fortunately your processing requirements are quite anaemic and you should be able to buy some quad-Xeon boxes on Fleabay for very little. Just have umpteen VMs running Linux, your VPN tunnel software, and Chrome. Top of the Fleabay listings are Dell R170s with 4x 4 core Xeons for £134. Three of those would sort you.[/QUOTE]

Thanks, buddy: What is a Xeon box? Do I just buy them and plug them in? Or do I need them with anything else in order for them to work?

If a box falls over its not a huge deal at this stage I'm only a small business. I can reboot them

 

[Bossmatics]

I use a dynamic memory on my Hyper VMs which I'm happy with and probably use about that memory anyway.

I literally work from home soon don't have a rack or servers setup. The requirements are low to use the VMs. What i was thinking is if I buy a PC and get 32gb RAM what else do I need forgot to work. Can I cheap out on a motherboard or other parts. Is it all that is needed to run these things?

I have 5 run it stable on my current setup but I built that for gaming. Can I build a pc with better RAM for a similar or less price that is specifically just for this job.

I have a 4k monitor set up ready to go which I want to connect to this PC so I have a view of all the accounts running.

 

[Bossmatics]

I have to use Chrome as i use Chrome extensions for a lot of my work too.

 

[Bossmatics]

For your budget ebay is your best hardware option. I've bought a couple of Dell R410's (2x6 core Xeon's, 32GB, Dual PSU and 2TB RAID) for about £400 each a while back. Have had them running VMWare 24x7 for 12 months with no issues, would give you more redundancy than other options.

For your purposes though it's worth looking at alternative cloud options etc. Running Windows VM's on a server seems a pretty crude way to achieve what you are doing.

If I buy an R410 can I set it up with Windows as usual. Just plug it it then connect a HDMI port to it and it will run like a normal PC?