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[Bary1044]

Hi All,

 

I would like to know what hardware is currently being used in your systems.

 

To be more specific what CPU, Motherboard and RAM are you using.

I have been using an HP Proliant ML310e Gen8 V2 sever for a while now, Its mainly used as an Plex Media server and File server.

 

I would like to create a server that is much more powerful, I want to run PLEX, 2 Windows VM's 1 with GPU Pass through and the other to just mess around in and a OSX VM with GPU Pass through as well as a couple of docker apps . (OSX is a nice to have not compulsory if the build gets really expensive or it limits the hardware availability.)

 

[SSD]

Has more to do with what you'll be doing. How many simultaneous transcodes in Plex? 4K? Heavy gaming? Other heavy Windows processing?

 

Based on what you've said and assuming nothing out of the ordinary, I think a passmark of around 10K would work pretty well. Look at quad core minimum. Hex and more cores are options to get more power. I run a quad core. 3 cores for Windows (1 dedicated, others shared), 3 cores for Plex (all shared). Works well on E3 1270v3 Haswell Xeon with 32G. Have some other seldom used VMs. No passthrough. And other Dockers that are not heavy.

 

The extra VM, assuming only used occasionally, may require extra RAM but maybe not extra CPU. Again, depends on what you're doing and cores can be shared. If lightly utilized, leaves lion's share of the CPU avail for other uses. I don't do dual GPU passthrough. Obviously the motherboard had to support. BTW - I find passing through a USB 2.0 controller to my VM is important for keyboard/mouse.

 

You might look at NoMachine as an alternative to passthrough for the less used VM and start with just one passthrough. Your Windows VM can connect to the other VM and present its virtual desktop. I am very impressed with No Machine vs VNC.