New NAS and maybe Consolidating my two Rigs

Good Day everyone,

I’ve read quiete a lot already on similar Use-cases but I still can’t decide between a few things so I would like to ask for help/opinions from you guys.

About me: I’m 25 and a SysAdmin at a Major Company in Austria, so I know at least a thing or two. I also graduated in Biomedical Engeneering and used SolidEdge a lot during School and want to get back to it.

My Current Setup:

Main PC:

  • i7 5960x
  • Asus Rampage V Extreme with 64 GB of Ram
  • 1 TB NVME
  • 2 TB Spinning Rust
  • GTX980ti (still the same Card I bought in school back than…)

NAS:

  • 4U Server case
  • i5 8500
  • Asus Prime b350m-a
  • 16GB RAM
  • 6x HDD
  • 1 NVME as Cache
  • and 1 SATA SSD which I can’t use 'cause my Mobo doesn’t have enough Ports
  • 10 Gbit SFP+ card which takes up the only full size pcie slot
  • I have a HBA but can’t use it because there is no expansion possibility on the board, 10Gig takes priority for me here.

I want to expand my Nas with more Storage and more Performance as I often face the Problem of the CPU beeing pinged at 100%.
My Main OS on the NAS is Unraid which I quiete like and would prefere to keep.
I have a few VMs running, Mostly Windows and 1 Linux Distro which I often change to try new things and so on.
As one might guess, it’s a little too much for my poor 6 core CPU hence the Upgrade.
Of cause I have a few Dockers running as well, mainly Plex, sabnzb, jDownloader, homebridge, and nextcloud. All the other Software is running in a VM.

What I want to do:

  • ESXI or Proxmox with Unraid in a VM
  • add my HBA for more Storage
  • Give my VMs more Cores (whithout overprovisioning them) and Ram
  • later on add a SQL VM for test purposes and cuntinue learning on my free time
  • a VM to get the Kafka lab installed to try and understand it a little better since we will be using it in the not so distant future

An interesting Idea came to my mind that I would love to consolidate my two Systems.
So Virtualize my Gaming PC as well with full GPU Passthrough. (that would allow me to safe a little bit of Space since our Apartment isn’t too big)

So I’m probably going with an Epyc 7302P (I can get it at a good price locally) which would suffice for the near Future as I don’t have a lot of Money to Spare (Marriage coming up and planning for a house)
Most VMs won’t be running all the time, just when I need them.

My Problem is that I can’t decide on the Motherboard for the Epyc
I have found the following Options Used that are in my Price Range:

  • SuperMicro H11ssl-i r2.0 - EPYC v1/v2; I know pretty BareBones for a Server Board but would Support what I plan to do and has IPMI; only PCIe 3.0
  • Asus KRPA-U16 - EPYC v2/v3; PCIe 4.0 on two slots, less physical PCIe slots but a OCP 2.0 spot for a network card and a lot of oculink connectors. no idea how good their managment software is.

SO:

  1. Do you guys see any Reason to go with one over the other?

  2. Problems with Consolidating the two Systems? I play mostly in 1440p or 4k Story games (don’t play online very much) so Latency isn’t that noticable as far as I have understood it.

  3. Proxmox or ESXI?

Any Input is welcome and appreciated!
I’ve done some research, and yes Epyc is mostly Overkill right now, but maybe I have overlooked something so thats why I’m here. TR is out of my Price-Range btw…

Looking forward to your Answers.

Best Regards
Thomas

Hi,
with Proxmox you have ZFS and Samba already in your host system, hence no need to virtualize a NAS, at least if you do not need the functionality of Truenas.
For convenience install Cockpit or Webmin, depending on what else you need.

ESXI without Vsphere is a bit basic, not bad but since they belong to Broadcom I try to avoid them.

I had a couple of Supermicro Boards and has had no problems with it so far.

I would recommend the h12ssl-i-bulk, it is Epyc 7003 compatible, maybe in 3-4 years you want a 7443P.

I can’t say anything about ASUS server boards and most likely I will never buy one as long as Supermicro has the right board for me.

Regards

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