Server advice - what would you do?

enigma27

enigma27

enigma27

Associate
Joined
3 Jun 2007
Posts
2,282
Location
Essex
Hi All.

I have a sever running Unraid in an HP microserver which serves me well.

I am looking at building a new server in a 4U rack case so to be able to run a few VM's and do GPU passthrough..

what I am struggling to decide on is the CPU hardware.

I think my choices either go second hand dual Xeon (Something like dual 2630V2 6 cores) or base the server around maybe a first gen Ryzen 6 core CPU

Although the Xeon chips seem to be cheap at around 30-40 quid each the dual motherboards seem to be quite expensive.

what would you recommend?

The VM i plan to run will be used on my TV for my daughter to play Minecraft mostly but I might dable in some couch gaming.

Rest of the server will be running plex server.
 
It will be in a cupboard under the stairs directly behind the TV wall which has an HDMI cable that runs through the wall so will not be heard.
 
I’d personally go for a Ryzen. The technology is newer, faster and much more power efficient than the Xeons. I went from a Xeon 2630 to a Ryzen 2700 and now have to turn the heating on in my study...
 
For a proper answer you would need to flesh out your requirements. What are the VMs going to be doing, how many of them, what requirements for GPU Pass-through? The Xeon CPUs have great output for what they're designed for, but Ryzen may be a better alternative on the cost and power costs overall, obviously you're generally more limited to a single CPU, so if your VMs aren't going to benefit from more than a single CPU then again a positive for Ryzen. Another thing to consider is stability, server grade Xeon boards tend to get ECC memory in, you can save costs with a more budget build if you don't require ECC memory.

With what you mention, things like a Minecraft Server, I don't know much about the game but you're not going to be looking at stability, it can be powered off if needed, same with Plex - so I would cost up a dual Xeon on price and estimated energy costs versus a newer Ryzen build which is going to be much more efficient on the energy bill.
 
Throrik said:
For a proper answer you would need to flesh out your requirements. What are the VMs going to be doing, how many of them, what requirements for GPU Pass-through? The Xeon CPUs have great output for what they're designed for, but Ryzen may be a better alternative on the cost and power costs overall, obviously you're generally more limited to a single CPU, so if your VMs aren't going to benefit from more than a single CPU then again a positive for Ryzen. Another thing to consider is stability, server grade Xeon boards tend to get ECC memory in, you can save costs with a more budget build if you don't require ECC memory.

With what you mention, things like a Minecraft Server, I don't know much about the game but you're not going to be looking at stability, it can be powered off if needed, same with Plex - so I would cost up a dual Xeon on price and estimated energy costs versus a newer Ryzen build which is going to be much more efficient on the energy bill.
Click to expand...

Hi Mate.

Server will be used to host a plex server and a few other docker containers for Pi-Hole etc.

Then i want to run a windows 10 VM with gpu pass-through which would be connected to my TV to play games like minecraft/roblox

I was thinking the dual xeon set-up so i could assign one whole cpu to the VM and leave the second one for unraid.

With the ryzen although better for power I would be limited to maybe 4 cores for the VM leaving 2 cores for unraid.

The gpu will probably be a 1060 6gb i have spare
 
Don’t buy v1/v2 Xeon’s, it may sound cool to run a dual set-up, but it’s utterly stupid at this point unless you need don’t care about power, efficiency and logic.

Unraid is pretty light in CPU requirements, same with PiHole and Plex should be as you won’t need to transcode locally if you do things properly. Last I looked Minecrap was pretty light on resources as well, so why on earth would you want/need a V1 Xeon set-up, let alone a dual V1 Xeon set-up?

A Ryzen 1700 is 8c/16t, it’ll eat everything you describe alive and do so with a 65w TDP, also AMD quite TDP at 100% load inc. boost IIRC, intel don’t. It’ll do so quietly, with modest cooling required and that’s an £80ish chip that has a clear upgrade path to current gen. as well as a potential further refresh on the same socket. A decent x370 board starts at circa £60, a Bx50 at even less. NVMe/DDR4 support as standard etc. With the advent of larger drives and cheap unlimited cloud storage being mounted within UnRAID, large drive arrays have become less relevant unless you have internet delivered by two cups and a bit of string.

4U tends to be expensive, consider 3U, it still takes a full height card and has decent storage density. I say that as someone who runs 3 x99 based i7/Xeon V3/V4 servers in 3U cases with a mix of Unraid/ESXi/Ubuntu and an ‘old’ Ryzen 1700, within 6 months it’ll be two Ryzen systems as the numbers make way more sense and they are easier to live with. The only thing I might miss about my enterprise class server boards is IPMI, but it’s a novelty when the hardware is local.
 
Listen to Avalon. He knows what he’s talking about! My 2p is that you can also use an everyday full tower PC case rather than a rack case.
 
Avalon said:
Don’t buy v1/v2 Xeon’s, it may sound cool to run a dual set-up, but it’s utterly stupid at this point unless you need don’t care about power, efficiency and logic.

Unraid is pretty light in CPU requirements, same with PiHole and Plex should be as you won’t need to transcode locally if you do things properly. Last I looked Minecrap was pretty light on resources as well, so why on earth would you want/need a V1 Xeon set-up, let alone a dual V1 Xeon set-up?

A Ryzen 1700 is 8c/16t, it’ll eat everything you describe alive and do so with a 65w TDP, also AMD quite TDP at 100% load inc. boost IIRC, intel don’t. It’ll do so quietly, with modest cooling required and that’s an £80ish chip that has a clear upgrade path to current gen. as well as a potential further refresh on the same socket. A decent x370 board starts at circa £60, a Bx50 at even less. NVMe/DDR4 support as standard etc. With the advent of larger drives and cheap unlimited cloud storage being mounted within UnRAID, large drive arrays have become less relevant unless you have internet delivered by two cups and a bit of string.

4U tends to be expensive, consider 3U, it still takes a full height card and has decent storage density. I say that as someone who runs 3 x99 based i7/Xeon V3/V4 servers in 3U cases with a mix of Unraid/ESXi/Ubuntu and an ‘old’ Ryzen 1700, within 6 months it’ll be two Ryzen systems as the numbers make way more sense and they are easier to live with. The only thing I might miss about my enterprise class server boards is IPMI, but it’s a novelty when the hardware is local.
Click to expand...

Thanks mate.

Did a lot more reading last night and think I am gonna go with Ryzen 1700 although cant seem to find much around the 80 quid mark they seem to be more around the 130.

The reason for the server case is I also have a pfsense server and a rack switch and around 6 Ethernet runs into the cupboard from around the home so will feed them into a patch panel for tidyness as its a bit messy at the moment.
 
Have a look on the members market on here or a ‘well known auction site’, 2700’s are more like £130+ atm. 1700’s are £80+ and both are a lot of chip for the money.

Case wise the best deals for quality kit often include older hardware, ‘white box’ builds in Supermicro chassis for example often crop up, it just depends how they are listed and where they are, it’s really pot luck that you find them. I’ve over paid for crappy servers just to get the chassis before and driven hundreds of miles for the privilege.
 
Generally I'd agree with Avalon especially multi-socket lower end Xeons make zero sense these days versus Ryzen - cross socket Xeons tend to be relatively inefficient scaling wise anyhow though more noticeable at higher core counts but even in multi-threaded situations a higher frequency 8/16 CPU will often be no slower than 2x 6/12 lower frequency CPUs and potentially faster for some workloads. (when comparing a more modern desktop frequency CPU to older lower frequency server CPUs).

There are some V2 Xeons that come up now and again pretty cheap that have high boost clocks, lots of cores and relatively reasonable power use but if used alone in a multi-socket board you will likely lose some integrated controller or pci-e slot functionality. I'd only recommend that if you can get very very cheap and/or already have part of or an existing system to upgrade.

The only reason to go with the 16xx Xeons at all is that Q series are readily available which are overclockable - otherwise they are distinctly a poor option these days versus Ryzen.

A Ryzen 2600 with higher boost clocks will murder a single 2630V2 on pretty much every metric unless you have very specific memory bandwidth requirements and not hideously behind dual 2630s in a lot of cases in multi-threaded workloads unless you have a task that utilises lots and lots of cores effectively.
 
Last edited:
Hi All.

So server has started to come together.

Pick up a Ryzen 1700 for 82 pound, asus X370 pro motherbaord for 43 pound and 16gb of ram 3000mhz for 42 pound.

I now just need to sort out storage.

I already have 4 HDD for the array in unraid but I amlso getting an NVME for cache.. thinking 512gb should do it. Then and standard 512gb SSD to pass through and be used as a dedicated hard drive for windows 10 VM for the kids to use on the TV.

will 512gb be enough for cache?
 
Last edited:
See, if you have the time to wait you can build a powerful, yet power efficient server for relatively little. Cache wise it depends how much data you want to write in one go and how much space your Docker/VM’s use on your cache drive. I’d suggest it’s probably unlikely you need more than 512GB, but it’s possible.
 
Avalon said:
I’d suggest it’s probably unlikely you need more than 512GB, but it’s possible.
Click to expand...

2x800GB SSD here for cache! Came in handy throwing loads of stuff from old XPen box... overkill, yes, but they were hanging around in parts cupboard, begging to be used for something other than STEAM.
 
whiskycycle said:
2x800GB SSD here for cache! Came in handy throwing loads of stuff from old XPen box... overkill, yes, but they were hanging around in parts cupboard, begging to be used for something other than STEAM.
Click to expand...

Is now a bad time to mention I use a 2TB NVMe cache drive? In fairness it allowed me to ditch some SSD drives that were directly passed to VM’s and free ports. Then I went in a different storage direction altogether :)
 
Avalon said:
Is now a bad time to mention I use a 2TB NVMe cache drive?
Click to expand...

Howay, gis time to catch up! Different storage direction here soon, still in the planning stages... get rid of as much spinning rust as possible, cloud the hell out of non-essential data and only hold personal stuff local (with off site archive/mirror at sister’s).
 
Server is now up and running.

was really easy to move the array over to the new hardware...

Still waiting for my 512gb SSD to arrive for the windows VM and have stuck a 256gb nvme for cache for the time being and am moving all the appdata/domain shares over to cache.

seeing as I am going to be running a full time VM on the machine with windows 10 does it make sense to pin CPU cores to docker/system?

or when i start the VM just un-tick the first two and leave the rest for the VM?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom