Help me refine my multi-headed virtualized workstation

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

RudeRubbish

New Member
Dec 5, 2016
17
0
1
41
I want to build One Computer To Rule Them All.
I plan to have a multiheaded setup, with one pair of monitors, keyboard + mouse each Windows and Linux, running in VMs. Windows will be used for gaming and graphic art projects, Linux for data science/bioinformatics, so performance is important.
I am thinking to have a separate drive with two partitions to hold the Dropboxes from Win and Linux. My thought is to move frequent read-writes to a separate drive from the OSs. I figure it's OK to used striped since everything on this drive will be backed up to the cloud anyway.
There will be an additional monitor and keyboard used for controlling the host, and using some tertiary VMs (one for browsing sketchy sites, one exclusively for online purchases, banking etc).
I am thinking to use Proxmox on one of the up and coming Ryzen Threadrippers (16 core + 44 PCIe lanes), although I am open to changing choice of hypervisor and ZFS host, or hardware choices if there are better options)

Anyway, I made a little sketch of my server plans. I'd be glad of any suggestions/criticisms/comments.
 

Attachments

MiniKnight

Well-Known Member
Mar 30, 2012
3,072
973
113
NYC
Zen and Proxmox = :confused:

It'll be cheaper to get dual E5 V3's and you'll have way more cores and PCIe and RAM capacity.


Zpool3 is crazy overkill if you've got 800GB L2ARC for 2x2TB. Save money on L2ARC and don't worry about getting mirrors and stripes there. L2ARC is read cache so it doesn't need to be mirrored. Striped on this type of system you won't get big benefits from. It's also slow to fill. You'd be better off with a fast storage pool for heavy disk io.

Why do you need a second monitor? I'd just setup a x11 server if I wanted a Linux desktop for a light GUI.

Did you see the post for sketchy sites? Check throwaway Docker Linux desktop for an idea. I read that STH guide and I've been doing it once or twice a day.
 
  • Like
Reactions: RudeRubbish

RudeRubbish

New Member
Dec 5, 2016
17
0
1
41
Since I'm not going to build for a little while, I expect that the kernel will be updated for Ryzen by then. 16C/3.9 Ghz sounds pretty sweet to me, but of course nothing is final until it's released and I know what the real specs (and the price) are.
If striping L2ARC doesn't provide significant benefits, I'm glad to not pay for the extra drives, same goes for striping the main vdev.
I'll look into the docker thing, my only reason for having separate keyboards and monitors is that I like to physically segregate my tasks.

Edit: Attached a new system configuration.
 

Attachments

Last edited: