Looking into eventually building a home server for myself mostly for VM use

Hardware Enterprise Gear
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Hello,

I am eventually planning on building 2 machines for myself. One of which is a normal mining rig (no advice needed here) and the second one is a server. If i can combine the 2 machines into one that would be awesome but if it cant/shouldnt happen then building a separate mining rig is also fine.

Use case:

  • hosting many VM’s, most of which will probably end up being public-facing games
  • File server, potentially public facing
  • Personal VPN (though i might host this on my pfsense box)
  • various other VM’s mostly for experimentation
  • potentially home automation/home surveillance
  • Since i dont pay for power, i was planning on using the CPU’s to mine monero during no-traffic parts of the day. It will also help heat the place a bit in the winters.
  • Not sure of i should stuff GPU’s into this machine to use as the all-in-one server/mining rig.

What i’m looking into is either

  • 2x Opteron 6172(12C) + Dual Socket board (Either Supermicro H8DGI-F or Asus KGPE-D16) + 64-128GB of ECC Ram.
    this option is tempting particularly because the 6174 12 core chips cost only $5 each + a bit of shipping, and the 16 core 6272 is about $40 per chip). also these chips seem to have a good hashrate overall
  • 2x 2650L or something similar + some dual socket LGA2011 board. Not sure exactly which yet.
    this one is choice #2 in case for some reason opteron doesnt work out, doesnt support certain features or isnt worth it

Im mostly looking for advice, suggestions, and criticism. I have very little experience with enterprise gear and i definitely want to make that jump.

2

First. On topic of combining the systems. It’s theoretically possible. As long as the motherboard and CPUs allow it. Generally it’ll be motherboard limitation.
Next, opterons are cheap. But also I found it somewhat difficult during my personal research to find good coolers for them. They had a funny socket.
Continuing. That’s a lot of stuff you intend to run. Also on point of you don’t pay for power, are you a student in the dorms? If so maybe talk to the IT department. They might have some systems that are retired collecting dust they could give you or sell for cheap. My brother did this and we snagged a dual quad core system to play with

3

Unfortunately not. I live in an apartment and power is included in my price.

Have you played around with opterons and if so are there any downsides with going opterons instead of xeons?

4

Ah gotcha. That’s pretty nice still

Anyway as for playing with them, no. The only issue I ever found during research was o couldn’t find coolers that would work well. Usually if you bought a rack mount barebones it nckuded the passive air heatsink. But for typical by mobo and drop CPUs in, I couldn’t find coolers that were decent enough

5

other than looking for heat sinks. and paying through the nose for new boards no reason not to get a few old opterons. if you can source the boards chips and heat sinks for under $200 then go for it and enjoy a former top end AMD server.