Hey, I am looking into the possibility of putting together an AMD Ryzen system for some home server tasks. We have HUGE HUGE data needs at my house so this being a NAS is pretty much guaranteed. I currently have a separate Pentium G3258 set up with pfSense and it does the job while sleeping. What I would like to do it consolidate pfSense, FreeNAS, Email, a Web and a domain server in one machine all in VMs. Thing is, for both security and functionality, the only way I would even consider doing this is if I can use PCIe passthrough to pass along my NICs and SAS controllers into separate VMs. I know Ryzen will work with ECC DIMMs, which is nice but as of right now, no one I have seen has done anything close to this or even attempted it with Ryzen, at least not recently after all the updates and fixes to the IOMMU. Generally, I was considering using ESXi at first but that was broken with Ryzen. They made changes for EPYC, but no one has tested Ryzen recently enough so I have no idea if the EPYC support helped with Ryzen. I am more than willing to go the route of some older Intel enterprise hardware but I can’t help but really want to use some newer hardware.
Has anyone at all tried anything similar to this?
Is ESXi on Ryzen working now?
IF I used a Linux Based Hypervisor, would it work then?
Everyone goes on and on about GPU passthrough, which is exactly not what I want or care about. I want my one 4 port Intel NIC and two SAS controllers to work, ideally with ESXi as I am more familiar with it.
I just need an update on this that is newer than 5 months ago.
Thanks for anyone’s input/advice on this subject.
Well, if I do take the plunge and get the hardware, I guess I can always try ESXi and if it doesn’t work, I could then go right to using a Linux based hypervisor. I was really hoping someone would have tried ESXi recently enough to have a clear answer because if I knew for fact it wouldn’t work, I would probably lean towards older enterprise hardware instead. I guess it’s time to do some consideration and decision making. Thanks for the input.
EDIT: Would you have a recommendation of a mobo that is less fiddly with the IOMMU and maybe won’t need the ACS patch? I would think if it were like that, it would be more likely to work with passthrough via other hypervisors too. THANKS!
Last I checked (a couple weeks ago), it wasn’t working with ESXi. Once Epyc has been out for a while, you can bet it’ll work, but not yet. Maybe soon, maybe not. I am very interested in building a ryzen or threadripper ESXi homelab as well.
Yeah, I saw the newest ESXi update added full support for EPYC so I was hoping that, since the architecture is extremely similar, that it would be working now. Without having Ryzen hardware yet, I just can’t test it. This was maybe 3-4 days ago. I am just chomping at the bit because up till now, good new hardware capable of running ECC memory, which I need for FreeNAS, has been prohibitively expensive. Though, if I ever win the lottery, EPYC for days!
