Hardware for Home use

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jkabaseball

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 6, 2004
Messages
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I'm looking to built a new home server. I'm thinking running VM will be the way to go. I have a free copy of Server 2008 R2 from dreamspark, so looking at going with Hyper-V, also a windows guy so shouldn't be difficult to pick up the basics. I'll be running a Host OS of server 2008r2, with a VM of WHS, probably throw WHS:Vail on another, and maybe an instance of server 2008 regular on there to mess around with. What kind of hardware would you recommend? Probably no more then 7 computer hitting it. Here's what I was thinking

AMD X4 or X6 (Would I utilize 6 cores all that much)
4 or 8 GB RAM
2 1 TB Drives (WD Black series or Green,any performance difference?)
undecided on motherboard, any recommendations, want to keep it cheap, prefer onboard video.

I herd the 890FX chipset was better for VT since it had some kind of additional VT technologies.
 
Looks fine to me - I use Server 2008 R2 myself to host WHS in VM. Hyper-V's passthrough disks are just awesome for WHS v1.
Any modern CPU should have VT. I wouldn't worry about.
 
I would go with the 6 core and 8 gig of ram. I love hyper-v. I'm hoping to implement my own little cluster of Hyper-V boxes this fall.
 
Evaders99 said:
Looks fine to me - I use Server 2008 R2 myself to host WHS in VM. Hyper-V's passthrough disks are just awesome for WHS v1.
Any modern CPU should have VT. I wouldn't worry about.
Click to expand...

Any modern AMD chip will have VT support. On Intel, all the server chips have it, on the consumer side it can be hit or miss unless its a Core i series chip.

I'm running an AMD Penom II 630 in an AM2+ board with 8 GB of cheap DDR2 800 RAM in my home setup. All my VMs are hosted on one 1 TB drive, except the WHS. The host OS is on its own 640 GB. I store all my OS/APP install ISOs, and sysprepped VM images for deploying new servers and stuff on it as well.

A second 1 TB drive holds my host drive and VM backups made using Windows 2008 native backup client with the backup job manually tweaked to only run once per week. If I had bigger VM drives or more stuff on my host OS drive, I'd need more backup space, but since both of those drives are actually lightly used space wise, its not a problem. All my VMs have one CPU assigned except for 1.

I have the following 6 VMS running most of the time:

2k8 R2 DC/DNS/DHCP server (800 MB of RAM, 35 GB VHD)

2k8 R2 WEB/FTP server hosting (1000 MB of RAM,2 20 GB VHDs)

2k8 R2 VPN/RDPGateway/SQL/hmailserver/webmail Server (1024 MB of RAM, 35 GB VHD)

Vista x32- VM running my companies standard Vista image I use for connecting into my company as my company laptop is imaged for use at the client account I support(1500 MB, 30 GB VHD)

Windows 7 x64 VM - Handles TV recording duties using an HDHomerun network tuner, also running MCEBuddy to convert shows to h264 MP4 format usign 3 CPUs about 15 hours/ day, moves all recordings to my WHS server when completed (1124 MB, 30 GB and 130 GB VHD )

WHS VM - Typical Windows home server functions and uTorrent running as a service (1000 MB, 3 2TB drives and 2 1.5 TB drives direct mapped)

I have 2 other VMs I use infrequently, and about 1 GB of RAM available on the host with my normal 6 running.

I can't wait until 2k8 R2 SP1 comes out, and only the real memory in use by the VMs is dynamically assigned. Then it won't take as much attention to the actual memory use of your VMs to maximize capability. If you assign 1200 MB, but it only uses 800 MB, only 800 MB will be used 2k8 R2 after service pack 1, right now it will reserve the full amount.

One step closer towards having ESX like memory usage for VMs. They still need to add multiple VMs with the same items loaded in memory remapping to a single copy in memory with virutalized pointers to get there though...

ESX has had both of those features since the ESX 3.0 release...
 
jkabaseball said:
AMD X4 or X6 (Would I utilize 6 cores all that much)
4 or 8 GB RAM
2 1 TB Drives (WD Black series or Green,any performance difference?)
Click to expand...

Sorry for the late reply, don't usually visit this subforum that often.

CPU: Depending on your budget it might be worth having the 2 extra cores, thats an extra 2 cores you can dedicate to a VM that may be running sluggishly.
RAM: Definitely 8gb if you can budget it.
HDD: For speed go with the WD Black 1TB (FAEX / sata6.0 model). The green are more for something like NAS or just plain ole storage drives.
 
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