I've been playing with the idea of a unraid build for a while but finally hit the point where I can't procrastinate any further. Was hoping the good people here could point me in the right direction -- I've been reading for two days and mostly going in circles.

 

Build #1

 

Small NAS (6TB-9TB)

A bunch of VMs (various o/s) but they won't typically be working at the same time -- just basically stuff I power up use and shut down I would like them to be responsive when in use.

An internal web-server so probably Ubuntu + LAMP -- running 24-7 but light use.

Probably a couple of dockers but no media transcoding.

This is for a small business so no high demanding games -- but could see a OwnCloud, Crashplan, OpenVPN, FTP server, maybe a SQL server.

 

1) What CPU would someone suggest for something like this?

 

2) Does having dual-LAN matter on the motherboard?

 

3) With the Xeon processors v3 Haswell and v5 Skylake CPUs with the same part number have similar specs and similar prices -- if I went Xeon my natural tendency would be to go with the newer v5 is that the correct choice?

 

 

Build #2

 

Media Server -- lots of storage + PlexServer + a few dockers for media stuff

 

As long as I go with Passmark 5000 or greater I should have no issues with up to 2 streams -- my only question is would I benefit in anyway from Skylake?

 

 

 

Regarding build #2 - The rule of thumb for Plex transcoding is 2,000 Passmarks per 1080p stream.  Like all rules of thumb it's right most of the time... and wrong some of the time.  The amount of horsepower you will need for Plex transcoding depends on the the format of your source material and the capabilities of your players.  If you have H.264 encoded source material and players than can support it via direct play then Plex won't have much work to do.  If you have native BD rips and players that requires lots of transcoding then a 5,000 Passmark server might not be able to handle two streams.  My 4,000 Passmark server spikes to 100% utilization when transcoding a high bit rate BD rip.

 

Would you benefit from Skylake?  IMO - eh, maybe.  The chips are slightly faster than Haswell/Broadwell and that's always good for Plex transcoding.  The additional PCIe lanes of the Z170 chipset and DMI 3.0 could be a benefit depending on how many controllers and drives you have, though I suspect multi-GPU gamers will get the real benefit.  unRAID doesn't support NVMe SSDs yet, so set aside that benefit for now.  DDR4 is only a little faster than DDR3.  If I were building a new system I'd probably go Skylake, but for a storage/Plex server I don't think it would be a huge advantage.

Thank you for the response -- learning about formats is on the to do list. Eventually I'll spend some time organizing that to get things into the best format to minimize load. It has been something I've needed to do for a while as I have a LG TV that has issues with some types of audio.

 

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Been doing more reading -- when people talk about virtualization and running a Windows or Linux machine on 2 cores are they using the unRAID server as their desktop computer as well?

 

That is a different understanding of what I thought was meant. Basically I currently have a few virtual machines on my desktop for using old software that doesn't work well 64-bit Windows. I then have two Linux machines on older PCs that I remote into when I need to use Linux. My assumption was that all of this would move onto my unRAID but that I would still need a desktop computer. If I can actually use the unRAID server as my desktop by just adding a gfx card and an SSD to the correct CPU/motherboard combo then that changes things as I was about to buy a new desktop computer as well.

 

Can someone confirm that my new interpretation is accurate.

are they using the unRAID server as their desktop computer as well?

That's correct.  It's new and it's not without some issues to work through but many people are successfully running Windows VMs under unRAID KVM so that a single machine serves as both their unRAID server and desktop computer.  You need to select your hardware carefully - VT-d passthrough is needed on both the motherboard and CPU in order to passthrough hardware like the GFX card.  Search for the many gaming threads popping up - gaming in a VM on unRAID is actually happening.