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Recommendations for components

R

Riouken

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 28, 2015
Messages
210
I am working on building out my home network, and I have not done any virtualization before. But I want to virtualize my home server. I am trying to do some research on components.

I am looking to buy in 2-3 months. I want to run a plex server on a windows vm that is capable of transcoding 3 1080p streams.

I also want to run one more windows vm for small Windows programs.

I will be running 1 download/torrent Linux vm that also runs couch potato etc. I want to run this vm behind a pia VPN.

I need another vm for a pbx server that can handle 5 VoIP with video.

And I would like a little room left over for some lab vms for me to play around with. Maybe 2-3 at a time.

Ipmi is a must. I plan on running it in a 4u box. Data storage will be on a separate nas.

I plan to run a pfsence box on separate hardware.

Any recommendations on CPU,ram and motherboard?
 
I would go with an 6 core (like a E5-1650) and pin out (isolate) 3 cores for Plex and share out the rest with all of the other VMs. I would go with 16GB (min) or more for the ram.
 
If you end up running XenServer (my cup of tea), it's possible to bond together multiple NICs via something called "Active/Active" within the XenServer settings. This isn't LACP bonding, and requires no modification of your network switch. It will auto-loadbalance your VMs across the bonded NICs. It won't make a single transfer go faster, but it will prevent all of your VMs from saturating one NIC.

Most other hypervisor softwares will let you do similar, but most will require a managed switch.
With an Intel Quad Gigabit NIC, you can make a 4gbps bond.

If you are running VM storage locally, you don't really have to worry about peak throughput.
If you are running VM storage across the network.... having more network speed at your fingertips is pretty sweet.
 
While I'm all for Intel Quad NICs (use them at work) for this application it's overkill. You don't need to bond either. Create a bridge and call it a day. Figure on a Gigabit network you've got 120 MB/s to burn. Worse case scenario for video is 5 MB/s. If you want 4 or 5 streams at once you've got 20 - 25 MB/s. You still have 100 MB/s to burn. If the NAS is on another box then there really isn't much of a reason to waste that kind of money.
 
I would keep it simple and expand from there. Quad core (or quad with HT), 32GB RAM, dual gigabit nics and call it a day. Set one vswitch with the Nics as active, fail over so you have some redundancy if you want. You never mentioned storage so we have to assume that is already handled. You will run out of RAM before you run out of CPU and network bandwidth.
 
I would recommend 2-3 NICs if possible.

1 for MTG
1VM Traffic
1 spare just in case you want to/can do some VLAN stuff for VOIP or something else..
 
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