I was in the middle of assembling a build for home (gaming/plex/htpc) and I was thinking about trying to use this as part of homelab build too. The goal is to try and live in the esxi/proxmox/(some type-1 hypervisor system) and still use a normal windows installation as I learn to administer the former. Ideally I would transition to using linux 100% of the time, but I do play some games that I’ve read don’t like vm’s like cs-go and such.
My primary idea is that I would slot in 1 nvme drive and just use it as my windows gaming machine in the case that I become too frustrated with the homelab work and whatever other storage I would use for my vms.
Originally I was going to build a ryzen 3000, x570 system, but with the 3900x being unavailable I’ve been looking into building a homelab system more. Also, a lot of the guides regarding PCI passthrough require 2 gpus, though I have read there are some hacks to handle 1 gpu that seem to work, though long-term support is questionable. Given the 2gpu requirement, supply issues of the 3900x, and bios issues of ryzen 3000 cpu’s I’m now leaning towards a threadripper system.
Specifically, I see that threadripper gen 2 is extremely cheap right now. 2920x is going for $300 at microcenter and was $250 on prime day.
I’ve read that people have had success with doing pci-passthrough with the asrock x399 Taichi mobo’s so I plan to buy that.
I have a 2080 TI that I bought to run in this machine, and my current machine has a gtx 1080 that I can use as a second gpu for the host in this setup. I almost feel like I should just use an intel chip so I can easily run the host on the igpu, but I would like to support AMD this generation, but this isn’t a hard requirement.
2080Ti (bought)
1080 (owned)-- might sell and replace with a cheaper AMD card if I’m just using it to run on the host.
2920X
Asrock x399 Taichi – open to others.
2x16GB 3200C14 memory (bought) – I wasn’t originally planning to go threadripper with quad channel so now I have some b-die that I need to find a matching pair of, and it’s hard. I might just find some slower 16x4 kit and sell this kit as I’m sure someone else will want it.
hx850 (bought)-- I think I’ll need to get a kilowatt psu given the power draw of a 2080 ti + 1080 + 2920x.
If my goals are to dual boot windows and a type-1 hypervisor is this reasonable and are there other things I should watch out for? I realize in general there can be a lot of compatibility issues so I’m hoping for some help auditing this build and the idea.
My background is a software developer and use some linux often, but I haven’t really done much sysadmin work so I’m not super familiar with a lot of technologies here.
Thanks for any help or thoughts!