It's been about 4 months since my last build post and that's like a lifetime for me as many of you know so it's probably time I post a new update to my home network changes. Many of you know I've been pretty disciplined over the past few years after downsizing my home network from a 4-node vSAN cluster to a single AIO server (+ disk shelves) for all my home server/network needs. Well, I've made the "big" decision of adding a second server to put Plex and a few other "critical" services of mine on it's own so that all my VM adventures can continue without any need to take those services down (VM configurations with lots of passed through hardware often require reboots).
So, I'm not going to include much info about my EPYC 7452 server, you can see those details from the link at the top of this post. The only changes to that server are that I've moved my Optane 900's over to the new server, added a dual 40GbE NIC, and moved my external SAS HBA (which I upgraded to a 9300-8e) over to my new server which I will detail below:
New Xeon E Server Build
CPU: Xeon E-2246G 6c/12t with Intel iGPU
MoBo: SuperMicro X11SCH-F mATX
RAM: 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR4-2666 ECC UDIMMs
HBA: LSI 9300-8e
NIC: Mellanox ConnectX-3 Dual 40GbE NIC
Storage directly connected to this box:
NVMe: Intel Optane 900p 280GB drives (x2) via M.2 slots
SSDs: Intel s4600 480GB (x8) via onboard SATA
HDDs: WD 10TB (8 Golds, 8 White Lables) via LSI 9300-8e to Disk Shelf (see below)
I've also upgraded my disk shelf from 8 disk white box units I was running in U-NAS 810a cases to a single 24 disk shelf (QuantaVault JB4242 SAS3 Disk Shelf)
One of the biggest changes for me was going from an Nvidia GPU (1660) to an Intel iGPU for HW transcoding. I didn't fully know what the expect but the results have kind of amazed me. I just did a test this morning and was able to get 38 iGPU transcodes before new streams would't load. I honestly think I was running into an iowait issue because htop was not showing a ton of CPU usage (Unraid dashboard includes IOwait in the CPU usage bars). Most of the actul CPU processing usage was from audio transcoding. I had 5 idle disks so if I had spread the streaming load out more I think I could have gotten more streams going but that's neither here nor there.
And some 4K HDR down to 2Mbps action here.
And finally, here's a pic of the current state of my home network rack.
So, I'm not going to include much info about my EPYC 7452 server, you can see those details from the link at the top of this post. The only changes to that server are that I've moved my Optane 900's over to the new server, added a dual 40GbE NIC, and moved my external SAS HBA (which I upgraded to a 9300-8e) over to my new server which I will detail below:
New Xeon E Server Build
CPU: Xeon E-2246G 6c/12t with Intel iGPU
MoBo: SuperMicro X11SCH-F mATX
RAM: 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR4-2666 ECC UDIMMs
HBA: LSI 9300-8e
NIC: Mellanox ConnectX-3 Dual 40GbE NIC
Storage directly connected to this box:
NVMe: Intel Optane 900p 280GB drives (x2) via M.2 slots
SSDs: Intel s4600 480GB (x8) via onboard SATA
HDDs: WD 10TB (8 Golds, 8 White Lables) via LSI 9300-8e to Disk Shelf (see below)
I've also upgraded my disk shelf from 8 disk white box units I was running in U-NAS 810a cases to a single 24 disk shelf (QuantaVault JB4242 SAS3 Disk Shelf)
One of the biggest changes for me was going from an Nvidia GPU (1660) to an Intel iGPU for HW transcoding. I didn't fully know what the expect but the results have kind of amazed me. I just did a test this morning and was able to get 38 iGPU transcodes before new streams would't load. I honestly think I was running into an iowait issue because htop was not showing a ton of CPU usage (Unraid dashboard includes IOwait in the CPU usage bars). Most of the actul CPU processing usage was from audio transcoding. I had 5 idle disks so if I had spread the streaming load out more I think I could have gotten more streams going but that's neither here nor there.
And some 4K HDR down to 2Mbps action here.
And finally, here's a pic of the current state of my home network rack.
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