Hello everyone, I have recently obtained a HP z840 workstation. It already has two cpus that together have 16 cores. Even though it’s last gen Ram it has a lot of upgrade potential. I am trying to put together ideas i can use to showcase in a powerpoint on linked in and on my resume when I apply to jobs. I have my A+ cert, working on two more and have two years left on my network engineering and security degree. I appreciate any suggestions that anyone on here could give me.
First thing I did when I got mine, was did a basic Win10 install to get the BIOS properly updated. Depending on the BIOS revision you have, you may or may not have access to PCIe bifurcation.
Mine came with anemic Xeon E5-2603v3’s, but 128GB of DDR4. I replaced them with the 2630v4’s, a couple more cores each and much better clock speeds.
Here is what I have run on it it to date:
Windows 10 Pro - Easy to setup network shares and light VM workloads
Windows 11 Pro - Easy to setup network shares, moderate VM workloads
TrueNAS - Easy-ish network shares, good container support, moderate VM workloads
unRAID - Easy-ish network shares, great container support, great VM workload support (if a bit migraine inducing at times)
ProxMoxVE - Never tried the network share or container aspect of it, but the VM capabilities are amazing, easy-ish and pretty straight forward.
Now, with all that being said, if you are wanting to virtualize GPU workloads for AI support on multiple VM’s, I would recommend going with either ProxMox or unRAID. TrueNAS Scale can be iffy with how it handles the GPU, and you aren’t able to run a VM without a viable GPU to pass to it. If you just need containers, then Windows, Linux (Debian base preferred), or unRAID would probably be the best bet.
unRAID’s ease of container deployment is amazing, and being able to set up the IOMMU pass-through to certain containers is much easier than you’d expect. unRAID does cost money, and it basically depends on how many drives you want to throw into it. The “Basic” license is only up to 6 drives, but you can do a free trial to see how you like it. It is also the only OS I’ve used that requires it to be installed on to a USB thumb drive, which is mostly ok.
TrueNAS Scale is completely free, and allows you to host any number of drives, and offers similar container support. It’s a little rougher in some ways to get it to run properly for certain containers, but that’s where reading the documentation really helps.
Windows 10/11 are by far the easiest when it comes to setting up a network share. You simply select the drive/folder, and set it up how you want. Windows also offers some of the more “easy” to set up RAID options, but not as resilient as TrueNAS or unRAID. There is a way to get Windows Server for free, it’s an Evaluation license and offers a great deal of options for you to play around with. Windows just take a little more fiddling to get proper GPU pass-through to work.
Linux is relatively an all around solid choice. You can do pass through much easier, set up VM’s with whatever options you want, and even virtualize your network attached storage.
The PCIe bifurcation will be a big one for you to get support for, especially if you want to use breakout boards for flash storage. Or if you want to go off script with it, you can get OcuLink converters, and set up oculink docks outside of the chassis to run a mass amount of anything.
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