Newbie looking for advice for hardware (business server with 5-10 VM)

[1mightyflop]

Hello everyone. I am a small business owner and looking to replace my current older Dell T610 Poweredge servers. Right now I am only able to afford used equipment so looking at Dell rack server with the ability to have Dell BOSS Card - 2x 480GB M.2 SSD for the main drives and then several other drives in a RAID pool for mass storage. I will also have 4x 10GbE (Intel X550-T4) 64PJ8 card and do have a 10GbE switch and router. I need to VM's that will have windows server for my DC and my APPS server and then I need 5-7 VM's that have windows 11 on them to allow people to remote in and use for work.

While these are not intense use machine (heavy graphic gaming or bitcoin mining) they need to be sufficiently fast and not get bottle necked by anything. I am trying to find the balance of how much to spend with value. It is hard to know how much memory to get or which processors to get.

In the past I have used hyper-V to set up VM's, but would like to try proxmox as it seems to be an up and coming environment that would work for us at the price that I could afford.

Where would I get info on CPU and Ram memory that would be "optimum"?

Thanks for any advice you can provide.

Steve

 

[davemcl]

Since you seem familiar with Dell I would look at 14th Gen i.e. R640 and R740.
They have great bang for buck second hand, you can run non-Dell SSD's in them and there are plenty of parts on eBay to stock up on in case of failure.

 

[ErinAran]

Look into craft computing or miyconst's youtube videos on the used 2011-3/X99 platforms. Said platform is a godsend if you're on a budget.

I would look into Dell precision 5810s as compute nodes if you're not too dead-set on a rackmount solution. I think rack mount kits are made for them as well, not sure on the cost of them though. With this platform, you're getting v3/v4 xeons, which are currently quite cheap. A 2680 v4 (14c/28t) for example cost me $30 CAD when I was setting up a cluster of these last year. For RAM, DDR4 2133 mhz on v3 xeons, or up to 2400 for v4s. The sweet spot for value is in the 8-16GB per stick range. Usually samsung or sk hynix stuff is what you'll find on ebay.

As well, they have 3 pcie slots each. This would give you room for a raid-backed boot volume via your M.2 BOSS card, a GPU for partitioned passthrough to each VM, and a NIC. A lot of these towers are sold with an older K/M series quadro included, which is probably more than enough for your needs. I mention the GPU because you can use it for HW accelerated NVENC video encoding with moonlight/sunshine for remote access. Way less cumbersome/laggy than RDP. Productivity number go up, etc.

For storage, each node has two 3.5" bays, and optionally another two 2.5" trays depending on the configuration of the machine you get. If that's not enough storage, I'd recommend just finding anything decently modern that supports ECC and slapping it into a case with a ton of drive bays along with an HBA card, then serve the storage over the network via your NAS OS of choice. I highly recommend these drives on a budget. Out of stock atm, but they usually get more in every so often. I've bought 10 of them and am yet to have a single failure after more than a year in.