Hey,
tl;dr,
I'm thinking of migrating my homelab from a handful of Sandy and Ivy Bridge E3s and Core i5/i7s to a single Ryzen ESXi Windows desktop (GPU passthrough) / FreeBSD file server (since Ryzen supports ECC) and a trio of old Thinkpads T520s to save power but still have high availability
I know I could go with Epyc, but I'm more attracted to the Ryzen 1) because I'm cheap and 2) because its single-theaded speed is considerably faster than any Epyc processor I could conceivably afford.
Right now my machines idle around 100w each so I'm consuming up to 400w power just having them sit on, add another 200w or so when they're being utilized - I noticed max power draw at the wall for a x399 w/ 1950x according to Anandtech.com was under 400w and idles around 75w, so that'd be a real power savings.
I've tested the aging Thinkpads I can get for $next-to-nothing and they're range is 17w to 45w each, work well with ESXi 6.7, have Intel 82579LM NICs. I ONLY want them for HA fault tolerance so the less they cost and the less power they use the better.
Anyway, I guess the question I'm wanting to ask is:
1) Do you use Ryzen + x399 for your ESXi homelab? Which motherboard? Which version of ESXi?
2) Do you use GPU passthrough (for a desktop type system)? Specifically, which GPUs have you tried, what did you have to do to get it to work?
3) What problems can I foresee running into if I go this route?
Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!
tl;dr,
I'm thinking of migrating my homelab from a handful of Sandy and Ivy Bridge E3s and Core i5/i7s to a single Ryzen ESXi Windows desktop (GPU passthrough) / FreeBSD file server (since Ryzen supports ECC) and a trio of old Thinkpads T520s to save power but still have high availability
I know I could go with Epyc, but I'm more attracted to the Ryzen 1) because I'm cheap and 2) because its single-theaded speed is considerably faster than any Epyc processor I could conceivably afford.
Right now my machines idle around 100w each so I'm consuming up to 400w power just having them sit on, add another 200w or so when they're being utilized - I noticed max power draw at the wall for a x399 w/ 1950x according to Anandtech.com was under 400w and idles around 75w, so that'd be a real power savings.
I've tested the aging Thinkpads I can get for $next-to-nothing and they're range is 17w to 45w each, work well with ESXi 6.7, have Intel 82579LM NICs. I ONLY want them for HA fault tolerance so the less they cost and the less power they use the better.
Anyway, I guess the question I'm wanting to ask is:
1) Do you use Ryzen + x399 for your ESXi homelab? Which motherboard? Which version of ESXi?
2) Do you use GPU passthrough (for a desktop type system)? Specifically, which GPUs have you tried, what did you have to do to get it to work?
3) What problems can I foresee running into if I go this route?
Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!