Hello all,
It's that time where I've decided I need to do a hardware upgrade on my FreeBSD box. Its assorted chores are fairly low-key in that it's the household file server (ZFS RAID-10ish sort of thing, 4+1 3½" SATA drives) as well as email (Postfix & Cyrus), web cache/proxy, print server, local webserver and assorted other gubbins. Usual sort of stuff.
I have also waffled: a lot. tl;dr version is at the bottom!
What I'm using currently:
he hardware is a bit long in the tooth and actually was when I got it as I was upgrading its previous incarnation on a budget: so mid-range Core 2, 8 GB RAM (non-ECC!
) blah etc.
For assorted reasons I've decided to update it. Partly as it needs better memory, and as I'm trying to keep its packages up to date and like compiling my own stuff (yeah I know... even I'm wondering why I'm making my life difficult: I have at least bitten the bullet and moved from -CURRENT to -STABLE where I'm much happier!) but I'm impatient.
Bhyve: "Do you think we should?" "No. Let's do it."
The slightly random ingredient is bhyve: that caught my attention and I found myself thinking, "wouldn't it be cool if my slightly noisy and also underpowered Linux desktop was hosted as a guest on the fancy new computer?" Which may be right up there with my other bad ideas like "wouldn't sticking with -CURRENT be awesome?" which I'm finally disabused of, but I think it's worth pursuing. I can't test out that theory because the Core 2 is too much of an antique to support bhyve.
But if that isn't a completely terrible idea (and Linux is a better option for my desktop as from albeit now quite distant experience, there can be compatibility issues) obviously I need to make it work. And do so sensibly, and I do not always do sensible. First off is that I'm looking at a Ryzen 2 based system. "How many cores?!" was one of my initial reaction but this'd be a nice way of using some of them. I also predict it would need in the region of 32GB (of ECC!!!) to give it a bit of headroom: currently the FBSD box is 8GB, as mentioned, which is "about enough" and the Linux box is 12GB which isn't enough, so absolute minimum would be 24GB. May as well round it up.
Possibly making life difficult for myself as I have a poor grasp of how bhyve works, I figured I could continue to use my KVM arrangement and possibly dedicate a USB port to the Linux VM and also a DVI port of a dual-head card. But I don't know if that's at all feasible, or if it's even remotely the best answer. Something tells me I shouldn't be running an X11 server on the FBSD box though: I want easy access to the console if something goes wrong, and an unresponsive X11 server combined with a LAN problem would render me unable to communicate with it, which is why I like the KVM idea, as much as it's a PITA in some respects.
And the last thing, and something which also dictates more modern (and supported!) hardware as well as CPU cycles is that I use external USB-connected SATA drives with geli-encrypted ZFS to do my backups. Something a bit quicker than the pedestrian 30-40MB/s I have at present would be nice. Currently a faster USB-3 PCIe card (before it promptly died) gave somewhat faster transfer speeds but I wonder if they were constrained more by the CPU horsepower than the HDD speed. Probably a close-run thing.
"'Blah blah blah-de-blah blah': get on with it, Vom!"
Er, yeah. So, hardware: aaaages back I was definitely on the Opteron bandwagon, but since the Core 2 and especially since the "i" series processors, I've been much more fangirly about Intel stuff. They've certainly enjoyed a per-core performance advantage for the longest time, though I'm also thinking that the price tag matches it. AMD have (and may still be) lagging in that regard but have gone down the "but we have more cores!" route. That's usually left me feeling sceptical of marketing gimmickry thinking back to Ye Olden Dayes when it was really hard to find enough work to keep all the cores of an MVME188 brick busy (er, that'll be a prehistoric Motorola M88K quad-cpu contrivance, briefly in vogue as a RISC replacement for their actually skill viable MVME1[467]x M68K-based boards: "everybody else is doing RISC, so we should too!") Plus the corporate mainframe only had three processors so obviously that was enough for anybody.
And while 57 cores might be slight over kill for a "someone just wake me up...?" type server, running VMs may potentially give them something to do. Yeah, I know I don't need those cores to run VMs (the aforementioned three-legged IBM 3090 running VM/ESA was certainly more than happy to run way more subsystems than it had CPUs, obvs.) it might give them something to do.
"Yes, yes, this ancient history is all very interesting, but please, get to the bloody point!"
Ahem. Okay. Ryzen 2 processor with "some" cores. Prefer ASUS board. Definitely want on-board USB-3. PCIe slots, one for the current SATA adapter that the ZFS drives plug into another for a dual-head low-mid spec GPU of some sort. 32GB ECC RAM unless I don't run bhyve VMs in which case half should do. Suggestions of good, compatible hardware for FBSD-12-STABLE?
By-the-by, probably not relevant, but just for completeness: another thing which instigated this is that the local power supply which whilst mostly there is now always 100% reliable. I would at least like enough juice to allow a graceful shutdown, as well as being able to surf through brown-outs without incident, which I suspect may become more common in future as I live in the UK which hasn't had a coherent energy police since the 1980s. The intent is to rack-mount both the new server (so a new case, probably a fairly ordinary 4U server case, and the games PC may also join it (and as much other gubbins as I can get off my desk, so hi-fi amp, networking gribblies, maybe the smallish laser printer too).
Enough! tl;dr version, please.
Vom is clueless and wants to update her FBSD server box. Something modern but not exotic.
It's that time where I've decided I need to do a hardware upgrade on my FreeBSD box. Its assorted chores are fairly low-key in that it's the household file server (ZFS RAID-10ish sort of thing, 4+1 3½" SATA drives) as well as email (Postfix & Cyrus), web cache/proxy, print server, local webserver and assorted other gubbins. Usual sort of stuff.
I have also waffled: a lot. tl;dr version is at the bottom!
What I'm using currently:
he hardware is a bit long in the tooth and actually was when I got it as I was upgrading its previous incarnation on a budget: so mid-range Core 2, 8 GB RAM (non-ECC!
) blah etc.For assorted reasons I've decided to update it. Partly as it needs better memory, and as I'm trying to keep its packages up to date and like compiling my own stuff (yeah I know... even I'm wondering why I'm making my life difficult: I have at least bitten the bullet and moved from -CURRENT to -STABLE where I'm much happier!) but I'm impatient.
Bhyve: "Do you think we should?" "No. Let's do it."
The slightly random ingredient is bhyve: that caught my attention and I found myself thinking, "wouldn't it be cool if my slightly noisy and also underpowered Linux desktop was hosted as a guest on the fancy new computer?" Which may be right up there with my other bad ideas like "wouldn't sticking with -CURRENT be awesome?" which I'm finally disabused of, but I think it's worth pursuing. I can't test out that theory because the Core 2 is too much of an antique to support bhyve.
But if that isn't a completely terrible idea (and Linux is a better option for my desktop as from albeit now quite distant experience, there can be compatibility issues) obviously I need to make it work. And do so sensibly, and I do not always do sensible. First off is that I'm looking at a Ryzen 2 based system. "How many cores?!" was one of my initial reaction but this'd be a nice way of using some of them. I also predict it would need in the region of 32GB (of ECC!!!) to give it a bit of headroom: currently the FBSD box is 8GB, as mentioned, which is "about enough" and the Linux box is 12GB which isn't enough, so absolute minimum would be 24GB. May as well round it up.
Possibly making life difficult for myself as I have a poor grasp of how bhyve works, I figured I could continue to use my KVM arrangement and possibly dedicate a USB port to the Linux VM and also a DVI port of a dual-head card. But I don't know if that's at all feasible, or if it's even remotely the best answer. Something tells me I shouldn't be running an X11 server on the FBSD box though: I want easy access to the console if something goes wrong, and an unresponsive X11 server combined with a LAN problem would render me unable to communicate with it, which is why I like the KVM idea, as much as it's a PITA in some respects.
And the last thing, and something which also dictates more modern (and supported!) hardware as well as CPU cycles is that I use external USB-connected SATA drives with geli-encrypted ZFS to do my backups. Something a bit quicker than the pedestrian 30-40MB/s I have at present would be nice. Currently a faster USB-3 PCIe card (before it promptly died) gave somewhat faster transfer speeds but I wonder if they were constrained more by the CPU horsepower than the HDD speed. Probably a close-run thing.
"'Blah blah blah-de-blah blah': get on with it, Vom!"
Er, yeah. So, hardware: aaaages back I was definitely on the Opteron bandwagon, but since the Core 2 and especially since the "i" series processors, I've been much more fangirly about Intel stuff. They've certainly enjoyed a per-core performance advantage for the longest time, though I'm also thinking that the price tag matches it. AMD have (and may still be) lagging in that regard but have gone down the "but we have more cores!" route. That's usually left me feeling sceptical of marketing gimmickry thinking back to Ye Olden Dayes when it was really hard to find enough work to keep all the cores of an MVME188 brick busy (er, that'll be a prehistoric Motorola M88K quad-cpu contrivance, briefly in vogue as a RISC replacement for their actually skill viable MVME1[467]x M68K-based boards: "everybody else is doing RISC, so we should too!") Plus the corporate mainframe only had three processors so obviously that was enough for anybody.
And while 57 cores might be slight over kill for a "someone just wake me up...?" type server, running VMs may potentially give them something to do. Yeah, I know I don't need those cores to run VMs (the aforementioned three-legged IBM 3090 running VM/ESA was certainly more than happy to run way more subsystems than it had CPUs, obvs.) it might give them something to do.
"Yes, yes, this ancient history is all very interesting, but please, get to the bloody point!"
Ahem. Okay. Ryzen 2 processor with "some" cores. Prefer ASUS board. Definitely want on-board USB-3. PCIe slots, one for the current SATA adapter that the ZFS drives plug into another for a dual-head low-mid spec GPU of some sort. 32GB ECC RAM unless I don't run bhyve VMs in which case half should do. Suggestions of good, compatible hardware for FBSD-12-STABLE?
By-the-by, probably not relevant, but just for completeness: another thing which instigated this is that the local power supply which whilst mostly there is now always 100% reliable. I would at least like enough juice to allow a graceful shutdown, as well as being able to surf through brown-outs without incident, which I suspect may become more common in future as I live in the UK which hasn't had a coherent energy police since the 1980s. The intent is to rack-mount both the new server (so a new case, probably a fairly ordinary 4U server case, and the games PC may also join it (and as much other gubbins as I can get off my desk, so hi-fi amp, networking gribblies, maybe the smallish laser printer too).
Enough! tl;dr version, please.
Vom is clueless and wants to update her FBSD server box. Something modern but not exotic.
- Multi-core CPU supporting bhyve (AMD Ryzen-2, maybe?)
- Motherboard: likes ASUS, doesn't like GB or MSI. Pref. with USB 3.
- Memory: 32GB ECC is probably sensible.
- Some means of separating VGA console from X11 server, possibly via KVM
- Preferably under £500 in total, if possible (not including rack, UPS etc).
