Server advice - what would you do?

[enigma27]

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.

 

[enigma27]

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.

 

[enigma27]

Ryzen over them Xeon's all day.

Strong

 

[enigma27]

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.

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

 

[enigma27]

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.

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.

 

[enigma27]

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?

 

[enigma27]

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?

 

[enigma27]

its going to be running a vm connected to my TV so my daughter can play things like minecraft... will have a GPU passed through.

 

[enigma27]

So again, why exactly does it need dedicated cores for that? It's a relatively low end game that'll use a tiny fraction of the available CPU resources, the only time you would normally want to give something dedicated cores (and permanently prevent UnRAID from allocating them to anything else) is if you had specific issues. For example you may do a lot of background media encoding/RAR/PAR work, so the CPU is pinned at 100% 24/7 and the gaming VM struggles. Without knowing things like what else it'll be doing, what the CPU/IO load will look like etc. I can't see anything you've said that suggests an obvious need for dedicated cores, but you know what you're doing better than we do and for all I know your daughter is a world class minecrap player and stays at it 24/7 for a week at a time, in which case i'm not messing with her

lol minecrap player indeed.. she is only 7 and begs me to play with her building houses, i just do it..

So tonight has not been a good night.

Server keeps crashing every hour or so and becomes unresponsive until i reboot it.

cant quite work out what it maybe.. certainly isnt heat (CPU idles around 29) and only manage to see one error in the logs hours ago stating something to do with a hardware error on the CPU although i've not been able to recreate that.

just removed the GPU in case it was that and it worked for all of 20 mins and boom locked up again with one core showing 100%

gonne whack a hard drive in it and try and load windows and see if that runs ok.

 

[enigma27]

well im confused

chucked an old hard drive in the machine and installed windows 10 fresh

Machine is running perfectly.. can benchmark blender R20 with all cores boosting to 3.2 with no apparent issues with the CPU..

So wonder why Unraid is freezing??