I’m looking for some advice on what to do with my setup going forward. Sorry about the long-winded summary of my current setup. I felt like the details of how I use the current setup was important to the question.
I have 4 x86 machines running in my home: my machine, my wife’s gaming rig, a VM host, and a FreeNAS storage box.
My machine is running an 8th gen Intel i5. When I bought it, I was not going as much development as I currently am. I am wishing I had gone with Ryzen for the additional core count.
My wife’s machine is getting up there in age and will likely need to be replaced soon. Furthermore, her use case is more suited to the i5.
My VM host is running a few Linux servers. It uses about 24 GB of RAM on an FX proc (yes, I know).
My storage box is not running anything fancy. It is just 4 HDD and 4 SSD directly on the motherboard SATA. I’m only using it for iSCSI to the VM host.
I live in the southern US. Having so many machines running is pretty consequential to my power bill, due to all the additional cooling needed. I would wait until supply chains normalized, but it is about to get hot out and I’d like to make the change before that happens.
What I’d like to do is give my hardware to my wife, decommission all other hardware and replace it all with 1 box.
I run 20+ GB of RAM in VMs on the host. I run Linux as my daily driver OS currently on my machine, but have a dual boot to Windows when I need to use Windows for testing apps or playing games.
Now that all that background is finished, my inital thinking is that I should be watching for a Ryzen 9 at a decent price, but I’m not married to that idea. I’m going to be pushing it on PCIe lanes, I think (NVMe each for Linux/Windows boots, 1 GPU). I’m not sure what I should be looking for in a motherboard, other than X570 for the extra chipset PCIe lanes.
I’m also torn between running a headless VM host as the baremetal OS and running my desktops in VMs or running Manjaro as my baremetal OS and using Qemu for all my VMs. Either way, passthrough friendly hardware will be helpful for flexibility while I figure it out.
EDIT: One more thing of note. I don’t intend to replace either mine or my wife’s GPUs. I’m running a GTX 980. The vGPU unlock Github project may be a game-changer for what I do here. I’m anxious to see what Wendell has to say about it in an upcoming video.
EDIT2: I’d like to add some more structure to this to focus the discussion.
I want to consolidate everything to 1 box, unless I can see a compelling reason to not do so. I’m trying to determine the following:
- What is the best CPU to build around for this use case.
- What should I be considering in a motherboard for proper VFIO/IOMMU operations?
- Are there any other pitfalls you can foresee regarding this setup?
- Which distro makes the most sense as a baremetal hypervisor for this use case? Proxmox, XCP-ng, or another Linux distro.