Building a home server for VM use

[MG42Maniac]

Hi Guys,

I'm working on an app with a friend and we have gotten to the point where we need some more computing power as we are running quite a few dev environments and emulators in Xamarin and running out of RAM and CPU. At the moment this is our current set up:

i7 920 @ stock
12GB DDR3
500GD Evo SSD
Windows 10

I am thinking of taking advantage of the recent E5-2670 flood and building the following:

2 x E5-2670
64GB DDR3 ECC
500GB Evo SSD
4TB storage
Windows Server 2012 VL

Would this be a good little upgrade? I am thinking it can be done for around £500/£550 and would give us more than enough power and last a few years.

The only problem I am having which may scupper the whole plan is the fact that dual socket LGA2011 motherboards seem to be a rare as hen's teeth. I've seen a few on eBay but they are extremely expensive and come from USA so I am guessing I will get hit with import duty as well. It is mainly the ASRock motherboard I've seen looking at but will buy any brand that is fit for purpose and not £350+.

Alternatively, could the money be better spent somewhere else?

 

[Throrik]

If you can deal with the electric/heat/noise cost then you can grab a proper rack server off eBay for pretty cheap - I have an R710 which has two quad core Xeons, 76GB of RAM and multiple 15k SAS Disks.

 

[bigyin9]

I just bought one of those on Friday from Ebay. Should be here tomorrow
I use them all the time at work and they are brilliant. The one I bought was Dual Xeons, 92GB of RAM. H700 Raid Card, Redudant Power supplies, Quad Nics for 350 plus shipping. I couldn't dream of coming anywhere near that building it myself. A little secret if you want to avoid the noise and heat with them is to use them as hypervisors without physical storage which is what I will be doing. My brother works for Dell and told me this as the monitor manager onboard will raise temps and fan speeds if HBA or RAID card are plugged in with drives attached. They are currently replacing hundreds of servers in a datacentre over in Ireland and its almost at the end of the cycle so get on ebay quick if you want one. I'm building a custom Freenas box which will deliver NFS storage to the server.

 

[neodude]

Dual Xeons here too. I did spend over 400 quid on a motherboard however

 

[MG42Maniac]

Thanks for the info guys, I have purchased the following:

2 x E5-2670 £114.99
64GB PC3L-10600R DDR3-1333MHz CL9 ECC Reg 240 PIN Memory - £89.99
Asrock Rack EP2C602-4L/D16 Server Board - £288
2 x Raijintek Themis Direct Contact CPU Cooler - £39.98

Will be going into a Corsair Air 540 along with 2 x 250GB EVO SSD drives. Hopefully it will be nice and fast!

 

[Azza666]

Thanks for the info guys, I have purchased the following:

2 x E5-2670 £114.99
64GB PC3L-10600R DDR3-1333MHz CL9 ECC Reg 240 PIN Memory - £89.99
Asrock Rack EP2C602-4L/D16 Server Board - £288
2 x Raijintek Themis Direct Contact CPU Cooler - £39.98

Will be going into a Corsair Air 540 along with 2 x 250GB EVO SSD drives. Hopefully it will be nice and fast!

I just got the game CPUs and motherboard! You got double the memory I picked up. Regretting not getting 64GB.

Should all be arriving on Monday/Tuesday. So excited. I'm putting together my first unRaid box. It's all going in a noise dampened Enthoo Pro. I couldn't afford an SSD at this time though. I would really like 2 and have them running a raid 1 btrfs cache pool.

 

[neodude]

I just got the game CPUs and motherboard! You got double the memory I picked up. Regretting not getting 64GB.

Should all be arriving on Monday/Tuesday. So excited. I'm putting together my first unRaid box. It's all going in a noise dampened Enthoo Pro. I couldn't afford an SSD at this time though. I would really like 2 and have them running a raid 1 btrfs cache pool.

Almost the same setup as me. You won't be disappointed with UnRaid.