Building a home server

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wtburnette

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Have a buddy looking to build a home server to play around with virtualization. He's going to want something that's fast, but quiet and energy efficient. I've been out of the scene for a while as I'm now in InfoSec and haven't kept up on hardware. He stated that he wanted 32GB for RAM and was going to use multiple 500GB to 1TB drives. Again, preference is fast throughput and access, while being low power and quiet, hopefully not overly expensive as well. I have no idea what to recommend for most parts. I was thinking about an Intel core -7-4790k for the CPU, but not sure of the rest of the parts. Recommendations would be appreciated.
 
First off: Try to stay away from the k series of processor for a hypervisor. They don't support vt-d, which is required for hardware passthrough to a VM.

Does your friend have a budget? Do they want to play around with ESXi or XenServer or Hyper-V?
Do they already have a NAS? Or is he intending on keeping VMs local to the machine?

I'd recommend something similar to my ESXi testbed system:
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1041413801&postcount=1484

It isn't impressive hardware-wise, but it has been brilliant in helping me learn ESXi.
 
T series Intel processor works well enough for a box that idles most of the time.

Tons of hard drives aren't quiet. My NAS / server box has 6 hdd's and it's not silent.
 
iamwhoiamtoday said:
First off: Try to stay away from the k series of processor for a hypervisor. They don't support vt-d, which is required for hardware passthrough to a VM.

Does your friend have a budget? Do they want to play around with ESXi or XenServer or Hyper-V?
Do they already have a NAS? Or is he intending on keeping VMs local to the machine?

I'd recommend something similar to my ESXi testbed system:
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1041413801&postcount=1484

It isn't impressive hardware-wise, but it has been brilliant in helping me learn ESXi.
Click to expand...

Okay, just the kind of info I'm looking for, K series is bad. Got it :)

He didn't give me a budget or what he wanted to play with, or what version of VM software he was going to mess with. He is planning to keep the hard drives in the local box and not in a NAS. I'll take a look at the link when I have a chance to see what I can glean from that, thanks.

dr/owned said:
T series Intel processor works well enough for a box that idles most of the time.

Tons of hard drives aren't quiet. My NAS / server box has 6 hdd's and it's not silent.
Click to expand...

I'll have to look into the T series. I assume those are good for vt-d?
 
wtburnette said:
Okay, just the kind of info I'm looking for, K series is bad. Got it :)

He didn't give me a budget or what he wanted to play with, or what version of VM software he was going to mess with. He is planning to keep the hard drives in the local box and not in a NAS. I'll take a look at the link when I have a chance to see what I can glean from that, thanks.



I'll have to look into the T series. I assume those are good for vt-d?
Click to expand...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haswell_(microarchitecture)

Basically anything that's not K and not i3 / Pentium / Celeron will have vt-d.
 
iamwhoiamtoday said:
First off: Try to stay away from the k series of processor for a hypervisor. They don't support vt-d, which is required for hardware passthrough to a VM.
Click to expand...

Not necessarily true. The i5-4690K and i7-4790K both support VT-d. Also, at least since Sandy Bridge the LGA-2011 i7 CPUs (e.g., i7-3930K) have also supported it (though these would seem a poor choice for the application).


dr/owned said:
T series Intel processor works well enough for a box that idles most of the time.

Tons of hard drives aren't quiet. My NAS / server box has 6 hdd's and it's not silent.
Click to expand...

There's no reason to get a T (or S) series CPU. Yeah, they have a lower TDP, but that's mostly because their top-end is limited. These CPUs are designed for applications where thermal performance is limited (e.g., small/tight cases with limited airflow). This is not the case for your typical aftermarket desktop case.

Generally, stick with the Intel CPUs without a S/T appended (e.g., i7-4790). These will idle at about the same draw as the lower-TDP models, will be more capable when workloads peak (e.g., transcoding a video stream), and often cost less.

Wikipedia has a good list for Haswell comparing CPUs.
 
Good info, thanks. Anyone have thoughts on a good mobo and hard drives for this server?
 
BlueLineSwinger said:
There's no reason to get a T (or S) series CPU. Yeah, they have a lower TDP, but that's mostly because their top-end is limited. These CPUs are designed for applications where thermal performance is limited (e.g., small/tight cases with limited airflow). This is not the case for your typical aftermarket desktop case.

Generally, stick with the Intel CPUs without a S/T appended (e.g., i7-4790). These will idle at about the same draw as the lower-TDP models, will be more capable when workloads peak (e.g., transcoding a video stream), and often cost less.

Wikipedia has a good list for Haswell comparing CPUs.
Click to expand...

It's not just their top end being limited. They're also going to be the parts binned for lower leakage. And small / tight area + minimal heatsink is pretty much exactly where and how a server is deployed. My server box sits in a node 804 case with the OEM heatsink from a 4770K and because it's all sound insulated the ambient temperature is well over 90F.
 
wtburnette said:
Good info, thanks. Anyone have thoughts on a good mobo and hard drives for this server?
Click to expand...

Anything that isn't Seagate 3TB. I'd recommend a Z-series MATX board. Getting H or B series or whatever gimped chipset usually ends up restricting you in memory, pci-e slots, and sata ports. I didn't want to mess around with a raid card so I just use some gigabyte z77 matx board that gives me 5 hdds + 1 ssd boot drive all on the chipset.
 
Good stuff, thanks. Am I reading correctly that the i7-4790K is fine and does support VT-d?
 
No problem, good to know the correct info ;)

I think that would be the best processor for him, along with 32GB of standard memory. He's not going to overclock, so I don't think he needs anything high end there.
 
Could also go with a Xeon. The E3-1231 v3 is pretty nice and with that you'll get the ability to use ECC RAM and can pick up a motherboard with IPMI which I've found to be really useful.

4790K is nice and does support VT-d like others have mentioned. I'm currently using one to pass through a 290X to a Windows VM for my games and it works great.
 
So what motherboards would be good with either that Xeon or the 4790K? I think he wants a standard ATX board as he's putting the system into a full tower case. Smaller could work as well, but there's no real need for it. Would rather have a full featured standard sized board if there are any that would be appropriate. I'm not sure if this will be his primary system and be for gaming as well, or not. I do know he won't be overclocking anything.
 
I can say one thing for sure - stay far away from Asus consumer motherboards. They almost never support RAID cards and other PCI-E thingies aside from GPUs. If doing GPU passthru, also avoid Nvidia as they block certain types of passthru in their drivers (in ways that used to work then suddenly didn't - they claim coincidence but research into it and you'll find that they're lying and they want people to buy their expensive GRID products).
 
Thanks again to everyone for their assistance with this. I feel bad being this out of it on the tech front, but being in InfoSec now, I don't have near the time I used to to keep up with things...
 
If he has money to blow, he may want to consider getting a Supermicro chassis. I upgraded from a Norco 4020 to a Supermicro CSE846 and it's miles ahead of the Norco. They're expensive brand new ($1200) but sometimes you can find deals on them used. Redundant PSUs are really nice and I replaced them with some used ones on eBay that were 80+ Gold and quieter than the ones it came with originally (non-80+): http://www.ebay.com/itm/SuperMicro-...651?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4ae043bd43 Keep in mind too, they make models with expander backplanes so if he ever wanted to make a large file server, he could just run a single SAS cable from the RAID controller to the backplane (assuming controller supports 24 drives). That alone is worth like $200 or so since you don't have to waste a slot/add a card for the expander.
 
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