My current system is running on an old 2U HP rackmount server with dual 16-core AMD Opteron-6262HE CPU's and two RAID-5 arrays (fast SSD array and slow 2.5" HDD array). There are generally 5-6 VMs running under a Linux master at a given time but none of them are using a whole lot of CPU cycles.
In general, it's noisy but fairly effective for my needs.
I'm looking at the future and what might be good replacement that offers a blend of power-efficiency, flexibility, and storage cost.
In particular, I'd like to:
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Ditch the 2.5" HDD array in favor of an efficient separate storage system, preferably an attached NAS with 3.5" disks on RAID5 but probably actually networked and not USB based (both for reliability and also so I can potentially provide storage directly to stuff running on separate SBC's etc). A storage system I could drop in now and still use after I upgrade the compute system would be great
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I'd like to keep the SATA-SSD array for stuff that needs faster disk, or possibly move up to a RAID'ed M2/NVMe.
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Move up to a more modern CPU that has a good Power-per-watt balance. 8-16 cores totally is probably good if that can be reasonably power efficient for idle cores etc, but dropping some VM's to run stuff on the aforementioned SBC's is also an option
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Still be rack-mounted for the main system, but not so freaking loud, and actually fit in a standard 24" deep rack
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Potentially be able to add a decent GPU or add-on board for processing AI models etc
Generally what it will be running is a bunch of VM's for stuff like NextCloud, remote-admin software, Media servers (Plex/Jellyfin), a Fileserver, some virtual desktops and various other fairly low-power VMs, BUT it'd be nice if I could add the dGPU or something with the horsepower for AI processing and periodic rendering/ripping/etc
I'm sorry debating on whether might make more sense to move all storage to BAD, then just replace the always-running stuff (NextCloud, Plex,Fileserver) with SBC's so that they're fairly easily swappable if something fails.
Perhaps my recent NAS/home server build can serve as a bit of an inspiration for you:
I don't think it's more efficient to separate processing and storage so I'd only go for that if you want to play around with a cluster. I would also avoid SD cards as a root FS, as they tend to die early and catastrophically.
Oh hell yeah. I wouldn't trust an SDCard to anything important except maybe a Pi where the actual OS is fairly unimportant and the data is stored elsewhere.
I had been wondering about the G series Ryzen. Is this running in a standard tower or something rackable?
I'm running it in a regular mATX case (Node 804) but I think you can also get AM5 motherboards in rack-mount cases.
My 7700x is 5 times that wattage. Granted, it gas 128gb, a380, 4 hdd, 2 SSD, 40gb nic, tpu, and 25 VMs running on it.
The lesson here is that I've way over-spec'd my machine.
That system also sounds a lot more capable than mine. How did you end up with 25 VMs?
It's not 5x capable, is my point.
About 10 of those VMs are running a single docker image. It runs great but I know better now.
opnsense
home assistant
neolink
NextCloud
Pihole
Frigate
Omada controller
Photoprism
Wireguard server node
Jellyfin
Transmission-daemon
Audiobookshelf
Plex
Arr stack
Caddy
Librespeed
Invidious
Openspeedtest
OpenMediaVault
VaultWarden
Paperless-ngx
Rustdesk
Proxmox Backup Server
3 or 4 desktop images to mess around with