I would love to do something like that/this, however, just the current equipment that I will be investing in is going to stretch my budget
1 Like
Dual E5 2670. The old ones. Just get the right revision and you are golden.
Then let me take the i7 out of the equation for you, a i7 like a 6700k is a quad core processor and sells for $300-$400 retail, using this CPU the best you could hope to do is to pass through 3 cores and 12 threads to the KVM, while that might seem ok to you your talking about running some version of Windows and then programs on top of that or games and would probably realize the performance of a celeron CPU for your Windows experience, realistically you would only want to pass through 2 of the cores and 8 of the threads to the KVM and guess where that would land you performance-wise?
So say you go for the big guns and buy a i7 6900k now you are in the $1000 price range just for the CPU, yeah you get a 8 core /16 thread CPU but your paying a huge premium over the Xeon at a lower clock speed, you really want at the minimum a 6 core CPU so you can leave 2 cores for the host system while passing 4 cores to the KVM, what your trying to do here is duplicate the hardware you would run Windows on and in the example here it would be a low end quad core CPU.
It's this paradox that sent me over to AMD and buying a 8370, without going through all the Intel vs AMD on how they process instructions at the CPU level and how Intel is more efficient (it is) or how AMD doesn't have the same kind of threads (it doesn't) I found the AMD offerings better suited for what I wanted to do at the price point I was willing to invest..
My point is if you consider buying a octo-core i7 you have far surpassed the cost of a server mother board and 2 Xeons E5's just in the cost of the CPU alone......it's not how you want to invest your money, and if you want to be successful at this type of thing you need a octo-core CPU which the Xeon is, forget clock speed it matters very little in this application, this is all about numbers of cores/threads and how much memory you can throw at it, it's just that simple.
Hope this helps.
I disagree, this is a home server. Everyone recommends the old ass 2011 hardware for home use but never really thinks about the consequences of doing so. First thing first, the power, noise, heat, etc to run this older hardware is something to consider in a home environment. Sure you can throw it in your basement but you still have a ton of power usage = money.
You are "investing" in old and outdated gear. Why invest in old crap? You are going to spend at least $300-400 for used motherboard that BTW won't fit in just any case, another problem to worry about. For the same or less you can get into a high core single 2011-3 system which can be run with low wattage power and near silent cooling.
There is no upgrade path from 2011, what you get is what you get. At least with 2011-3 you could buy a high end dual socket board now, run a single CPU, and then upgrade by adding an additional CPU later on. I would much rather invest $600 into a dual socket current gen board now than literally waste $400 on a used dual socket 2011 board that BTW has no warranty.
Some may argue that by going with dual 2011 will be more powerful than a single 2011-3 and in some cases that may be true, but who needs that kind of power at home anyway? Does anyone need more than 20 threads for a home ESXi server? The 2011-3 CPU I linked to is 28 threads, two 2670 (assuming v2) would be 40 combined. Fairly certain the 2 for $100ish 2670's on eBay are v1's which would be 36 threads combined.
You'd have to run a newer system really long for it be worth it.
32
Correct. Power is a factor, that is where Intel made improvements, sure. But the higher initial cost is killing that argument.
Heat is barely a factor and so is noise if you know how to build computers.
This one is whisper silent even on full load and it runs in my living room.
I took naps next to it... noise is not a problem.
Here is the details.
3 Likes
If the OP was strictly talking about VMs I would agree with you, but the OP wants to do hardware pass through to a KVM (kernel based virtual machine) this application requires not the latest and greatest hardware but does require robust and powerful hardware to run both the host and guest systems concurrently, it's easy to build around VMs because everything is virtual but in a pass through where physical hardware is actually passed to the guest to use exclusively it becomes a little dicey and a little more complex with a few more considerations to make, of course the total cost is always a factor, if the OP was talking about just running VM's in like VirtualBox or some other hypervisor/VMM I would be recommending the same as you.
1 Like
As Blanger has said. The machine will be primarily doing hardware pass-throughs to a KVM.
1 Like
From my research But not having physically built one myself yet I believe you would want a processor with decent core/thread count but also you would want high clock speed with those cores. Are you wanting to do passthrough for gaming?
A bit of gaming, mainly a lot more as a test bench for me to try all this stuff on. If all goes well i would game on it and use it as the main system for Gaming and also for the fun of being able to make KVM's of different distro's and OS's that i can pass through hardware to, without the rigor of going through and re-imaging the machine each time i want to try something new.
Although in the end it is all a learning project to see if i have the ability to do this.
I think this question depends a bit on what the main goals are with the virtual machines.
If you want to use them for gaming, then maybe an i7 or a Xeon with some higher clockspeeds might make more sense, then a Xeon with more cores but lower clockspeeds.
However if gaming is not really a priority, but you mainly want to run multiple vm´s as smooth as possible, then sure a Xeon with more cores / threads will be benefitical.
Xeon E5-2620-V4 vs 5960X or 6900K, is really a matter of price diffrence.
If the price diffrence for the i7 isnt that significant, then i would probably go with one of those i7´s.
Because higher clockspeeds, and overclockability.
But yeah, that also depends on the VM usage ofc like i said above.
1 Like
In the end i went with the Xeon E5-2620-V4 because out of everything I've looked through it seems the most suitable for what i want. and i just fit perfectly into my budget after all the other purchases that i had to make this time.
1 Like
Let us know how it turns out.
Will do. Should have the parts and have it up and ready to start tomorrow
Maybe not the smartest Idea to buy brand new 10 days before a ZEN event.
I'm hoping for the best with AMD but they have just always created a lot of hype and it just seems to always fall short. Don't want to start an AMD/Intel war but just my opinion on what I have seen
Its half sticking with the brand i know and half wanting to give the Xeons a try. I will most likely get a Zen chip when they come out, if they live up to the Hype, and once i save again... which should be when they come out.
I mean don't get me wrong i have nothing whats so ever against AMD, and i like their CPU's, i have some AMD systems. but all my main systems have been Intel.
I'll give you a little insight into my purpose in building the rig I use, I didn't have gaming as my primary goal in fact it wasn't really on my to do list because I'm not a big gamer although I do play a lot of games....hope that makes a little sense, my primary goal was to be able to run Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Corel Draw, and a couple color separation programs used in the printing/graphics industry that are also strictly Windows only programs.
My intent in doing this is that my wife owns a graphics business and neither of us wanted to move to Win X or really stay in that eco-system, we both knew and wanted to move to Linux but while it is easy for me it would be impossible for her unless she could run her Adobe products, yes she could switch to say Gimp and Inkscape and be proficient but that says nothing about the files already created that have to be used for clients, when you deal with graphic files that were created on one platform and imported into another you always have to adjust color, scale, etc and hope you get a printable image that matches the last printing...anyway.
So I started looking at KVMs as a way to run Linux and provide a Windows instance that she could work in as always but not be dependent to Windows as her sole operating system, I built my test machine, it worked after a lot of trial and error on my part as I learned what I was doing and what in the form of resources where enough to make it worth the effort in doing another PC for her.
I'm happy to say it worked way better than I ever thought it would...so I tried other programs and they worked in the Windows instance, so I tried games and hell yes they run too, gaming was a added benefit for me but one that I utilize several nights a week now.....
My point is that anyone can make a PC that will do this if you plan it all out and buy the appropriate hardware, I'm not knocking anyone who is giving you opinions or advice but I can tell you you have to think outside the normal PC building box, all the things you consider implementing in a PC that you will use for gaming or video production, or graphics are still the same considerations but you have to realize that those things will be provided both virtually and physically to your Windows environment, there are trade-offs that have to be made like clock speed (unless you are rich) that really have little to no effect to the KVM.
While clock speed is certainly a asset it isn't as important as threads/cores and since you are providing the CPU cores and threads virtually to the KVM you can lie to the KVM about what your giving it but the bottom line comes down to what you have physically hardware-wise to share virtually you can tell the KVM through QEMU/Vert-manager anything you like but if you don't have the physical hardware to back it up....well you'll just be fooling yourself in my opinion.
If Zen turns out to be what they say and at a decent price point I will build another pass through for my wife in 2017, if Zen is a flop or too costly then I'll build a Xeon rig for her, she's pushing me right now but I keep telling her she has to wait...lol Either way I'll be building another in 2017 and it may just be a dual Xeon.
Hope this helps.
1 Like
Thanks... Real food for thought.
1 Like