Built new X99 machine - but which OS to use?

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Burner27

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I built the following machine to be a 'multi-purpose machine':

Gigabyte X99M Gaming 5
Intel i7-5820K
32GB DDR4
nVidia Quadro 290 Video card (not being used for gaming)
Quad-port Gbit NIC
LSI MegaRaid 9260-4i
6 x 2TB HDDs (4 are attached to the LSI card in RAID 5 and 2 are attached to onboard Intel RAID in a RAID1)
1 x 512GB m.2 SSD for OS

Now I need to decide what OS to use. What would you do? I would use it as file storage, and a video encoding machine. I also want to run VMs on it as well. I have been using VirtualBox in the past to run VMs on Windows 7 and Windows 10, but I think I ought to get to know a real Hypervisor like ESXi or Windows Hyper-V. I have licenses to run Windows Server 2012 R2 which includes Hyper-V. What do you think? I could run a Win10VM for the encoding that i want to achieve and Windows 2012 R2 would be a great file server--no?

Thank you for your advice in advance.
 
If you want to do video encoding I would run that on the bare metal OS, not in a VM, so that means you'll want either Windows 10 or Server 2012R2 as the primary OS. Both 10 Pro and 2012R2 include Hyper-V so you're fine there. Personally I'd go with 10 Pro over Server just because the compatibility for "desktop" type stuff may be a little better.
 
Personally I'd still put Windows 7 on it myself but that's just me - Windows 10 offers nothing of interest or benefit in my usage. As for using a VM for encoding, I don't see the point as bigdogchris hinted at in the post above: since you'd want the best possible performance for encoding purposes, running it inside a virtual machine could only prove to reduce performance by a degree or two - not anything major or significant but even so, there's no real point.

If you already have licenses for Windows 2012 R2 then I suppose you already have your OS but again, just run your video encoding directly on the host OS and not in a VM. As for file serving purposes, can't really see a big need to run a server OS just for that purpose, Windows 7/8/8.1 and 10 all can do that sort of thing just fine since it's not going to be a dedicated file server. If I want server-like performance in Windows 7 all I have to do is change one radio-button setting under the Performance Options so it works better for background services and it'll work more like a server OS overall.

I was a big fan many years ago of the "change the server version of Windows to the desktop version..." idea until Windows XP Professional x64 Edition came out (not the 64-bit Edition for Itaniums, mind you) - since that version of Windows was based directly on Windows Server 2003 and not the consumer version of XP Professional (it was Server 2003 with the XP Pro GUI on top) it ran very well overall. To this day I've yet to encounter a version of Windows that ran as fast as Windows XP Pro x64 Edition on any given hardware (given it had 64-bit support, of course). Frame rates in games went up by 15-25% in testing on the same hardware in my experience - I still don't know what the hell was so awesome about that OS as many people hated it but that's their problem.

For me Windows XP Pro x64 Edition remains the best performing Windows OS I've ever used but Windows 7 is what I consider to be the best overall version of Windows ever made - obviously that's not a statement of fact so don't take it as such, it's just my personal opinion on what Microsoft has created since they came into being. Was sad to see that version dismissed so easily by so many, including Microsoft itself, but at least I used it as my primary OS for several years and was never dissatisfied with it myself.

Anyway, you asked what people think so, there's my thoughts. ;)
 
bigdogchris said:
If you want to do video encoding I would run that on the bare metal OS, not in a VM, so that means you'll want either Windows 10 or Server 2012R2 as the primary OS. Both 10 Pro and 2012R2 include Hyper-V so you're fine there. Personally I'd go with 10 Pro over Server just because the compatibility for "desktop" type stuff may be a little better.
Click to expand...

You bring up a good point about compatibility with different programs. If I truly want the machine to be multipurpose i should go for Windows 10 Pro then. I didnt realize Win10 had Hyper-V so, it is a non-issue now. I was going to use Handbrake for my video re-encoding purposes, unless you have a suggestion of which software best utilizes the many cores of the 5820K?
 
Tiberian said:
Personally I'd still put Windows 7 on it myself but that's just me - Windows 10 offers nothing of interest or benefit in my usage. As for using a VM for encoding, I don't see the point as bigdogchris hinted at in the post above: since you'd want the best possible performance for encoding purposes, running it inside a virtual machine could only prove to reduce performance by a degree or two - not anything major or significant but even so, there's no real point.

If you already have licenses for Windows 2012 R2 then I suppose you already have your OS but again, just run your video encoding directly on the host OS and not in a VM. As for file serving purposes, can't really see a big need to run a server OS just for that purpose, Windows 7/8/8.1 and 10 all can do that sort of thing just fine since it's not going to be a dedicated file server. If I want server-like performance in Windows 7 all I have to do is change one radio-button setting under the Performance Options so it works better for background services and it'll work more like a server OS overall.

I was a big fan many years ago of the "change the server version of Windows to the desktop version..." idea until Windows XP Professional x64 Edition came out (not the 64-bit Edition for Itaniums, mind you) - since that version of Windows was based directly on Windows Server 2003 and not the consumer version of XP Professional (it was Server 2003 with the XP Pro GUI on top) it ran very well overall. To this day I've yet to encounter a version of Windows that ran as fast as Windows XP Pro x64 Edition on any given hardware (given it had 64-bit support, of course). Frame rates in games went up by 15-25% in testing on the same hardware in my experience - I still don't know what the hell was so awesome about that OS as many people hated it but that's their problem.

For me Windows XP Pro x64 Edition remains the best performing Windows OS I've ever used but Windows 7 is what I consider to be the best overall version of Windows ever made - obviously that's not a statement of fact so don't take it as such, it's just my personal opinion on what Microsoft has created since they came into being. Was sad to see that version dismissed so easily by so many, including Microsoft itself, but at least I used it as my primary OS for several years and was never dissatisfied with it myself.

Anyway, you asked what people think so, there's my thoughts. ;)
Click to expand...

I do appreciate your thoughts and i thank you for them. I have licenses for both, but as Bigdogchris and you mentioned, I should run the video encoding on bare-metal not a VM. I am assuming Windows 10 would be fine as a file server OS as well, correct? What about teaming the NIC ports? Can that be done on Windows 10 to increase bandwidth?
 
Burner27 said:
I do appreciate your thoughts and i thank you for them. I have licenses for both, but as Bigdogchris and you mentioned, I should run the video encoding on bare-metal not a VM. I am assuming Windows 10 would be fine as a file server OS as well, correct? What about teaming the NIC ports? Can that be done on Windows 10 to increase bandwidth?
Click to expand...

HandBrake is just another application so it runs as well as it runs, no need for a VM just to use it and as noted it'll run best on the bare metal hardware/OS like any application would. As for teaming NICs, it's not something I bother with but it's most likely possible, not sure how much of a benefit you're going to see on a LAN - I mean I realize it could theoretically double the bandwidth, sure, but how fast do you really need to copy a file since you're going to hit limits either from the network itself or the storage medium? A quick Google search turned up multiple articles on enabling/setting up NIC teaming in Windows 10 so, you'll find the info soon enough.

Video encoding itself is a low bandwidth process overall, it's just going to pull a few megabytes per second from the source material as it crunches it then writes it back out in the target format, no more than probably 15-20MB/s at most in all situations even with 4K material. Now, once you've got that stuff encoded as the target media then yes you'd probably care about moving it around so that's where network bandwidth would play into things obviously.
 
Teaming NIC's doesn't do anything for single connections. You really can't use it to increase bandwidth for a single purpose.
 
Monkey God said:
Teaming NIC's doesn't do anything for single connections. You really can't use it to increase bandwidth for a single purpose.
Click to expand...
It could be used to increase bandwidth to other devices within your network that also use Teaming, but yeah Internet won't be any faster.
 
I don't think you can. I set one up to increase connectivity to a storage server before doing all my research. You can't use it for one connection between two computers for a single operation. You could use it for two desperate processes using each NIC separately, but that's not teaming. Its possible I haven't figured it out, but I bought a switch which supports link aggregation and both machines involved have dual Intel NIC's. I could never get more than one NIC's worth of bandwidth at a time for a single operation.

Edit:

I just realized my setup may be suffering from OS limitations. YMMV.
 
Monkey God said:
I don't think you can. I set one up to increase connectivity to a storage server before doing all my research. You can't use it for one connection between two computers for a single operation. You could use it for two desperate processes using each NIC separately, but that's not teaming. Its possible I haven't figured it out, but I bought a switch which supports link aggregation and both machines involved have dual Intel NIC's. I could never get more than one NIC's worth of bandwidth at a time for a single operation.

Edit:

I just realized my setup may be suffering from OS limitations. YMMV.
Click to expand...
If you do a single file copy, the team will not improve performance. If you are doing multiple file copies or operations the team will improve performance. But I use it in the an enterprise where you have to enable the protocols on the switch to enable hash based load balancing. I've never tried it on a soho router.
 
bigdogchris said:
If you do a single file copy, the team will not improve performance. If you are doing multiple file copies or operations the team will improve performance. But I use it in the an enterprise where you have to enable the protocols on the switch to enable hash based load balancing. I've never tried it on a soho router.
Click to expand...

Nope - I tried with multiple file copys and even different bandwidth testing tools. One source IP, one dest IP = one NIC.
 
Monkey God said:
Nope - I tried with multiple file copys and even different bandwidth testing tools. One source IP, one dest IP = one NIC.
Click to expand...
Yeah sounds right. Again, I use it in enterprise and there are several people copying to/from at the same time. Works well for that. But if its IP balancing it probably would only use 1.
 
Thanks everyone for the advice. I will try with Win10 Pro first and go from there.
 
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