Server Death - need build advice (thinking Unraid)

[Tomahawk51]

I'm heartbroken, and need guidance. I had just ugraded to v9, was swapping some drives around (migrated to a new 4tb), and when I went to power up...no signs of life, nothing. It seems the power supply is functional (fan spins with jumper), but the mobo doesn't do anything at all. I tried a CMOS reset, but not thinking it will come back.

The server was ~10 years old, so it's probably time, right? It was a Core2Duo e4300 on a Gigabyte DS3 965p mobo. IT served SageTV faithfully.

For a new server, I'd like to go to Unraid. I'd go Sage on Docker as soon as IR/Firewire blasting is an option. That seems to mean that I'll be living on an Unraid VM perhaps until then. I also think that I might want to have enough power for Plex streams. Various Dockers like Crashplan, Google Music... Ideally, I'd love to hit the Power Consumption vs. Capability vs. Cost sweet spot - utopia. I'd be willing to invest more though, as I wouldn't plan to upgrade in a long time. I won't be gaming on this.

I'm really stuck on what CPU to consider (and then to find a mobo). I see all this talk about ECC memory, and that seems to push to Xeons. I also see advice to "wait till Kaby Lake since everything will be better then" which makes me wonder about doing more budget investment now with a path to upgrade.

I'm overwhelmed. Any advice on what CPU and possibly Mobo? I can take it from there I think...
--need the VT-D/ VT-x? options for Unraid VMs
--don't THINK I need ECC RAM, but understand the virtue of it
--I'd prefer more durable equipment (e.g. see Supermicro mobos as recommended), but there is a diminishing return on that I'm sure

[Tomahawk51]

I'll share my thought development, in case it's of interest:

de facto start on CPU (given Tom's Hardware): i7 6700k

• NO ECC RAM - assumes it's really not needed
  10987 passmark score.
  http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-cpus,3986.html

The alternative mentioned, the Intel Core i7-5820K, has a lower clock speed, but 6 vs 4 cores. with plans to run Dockers + 1 VM maybe ... I'm assuming (no basis) the 6700k might be *better*.

[KarylFStein]

The Tom's recommendations are for gaming duties IIRC. I'd start with how many transcoding streams you'll want to be able to support.

[panteragstk]

Check this thread. Very powerful stuff if you can get a good MB. RAM is cheap also. I did it and am very happy. Lots of power to spare.

Used stuff, but good stuff.

For new, I'd go with server boards and ECC memory (not really needed, but not really any more expensive depending on what you get)

If you don't want to go the used route I can put together a server config based on your budget if you want.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

Check this thread. Very powerful stuff if you can get a good MB. RAM is cheap also. I did it and am very happy. Lots of power to spare.

Used stuff, but good stuff.

For new, I'd go with server boards and ECC memory (not really needed, but not really any more expensive depending on what you get)

If you don't want to go the used route I can put together a server config based on your budget if you want.

Make sure you check the stepping if you want to have VT-d support. Some Xeon processors are known to have it in one stepping, but not the other. VT-x is generally a given for Xeon processors though, so while you should make sure the processor supports virtualization if you're going to use it, there's a lot less buyer beware type situations.

[Fuzzy]

Totally depends on your needs. I have quite old hardware running unRAID (in sig). It works, but not enough cpu to transcode 2 streams at a time. Plus, it's an old tech power hog, so I'm wanting to upgrade anyway.

[wayner]

Did you try replacing the battery on the mobo? That has caused an old PC to fail to boot on me before.

[Tomahawk51]

Originally Posted by wayner

Did you try replacing the battery on the mobo? That has caused an old PC to fail to boot on me before.

I was so excited to try this, something that didn't cross my mind. Alas, a new battery does nothing . Thanks for the suggestion!

[Tomahawk51]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

Check this thread. Very powerful stuff if you can get a good MB. RAM is cheap also. I did it and am very happy. Lots of power to spare.

Used stuff, but good stuff.

For new, I'd go with server boards and ECC memory (not really needed, but not really any more expensive depending on what you get)

If you don't want to go the used route I can put together a server config based on your budget if you want.

I am SERIOUSLY thinking about this approach now - 2 Xeons would be building for future use I'm guessing. I'm not opposed to buying used (but prefer new). I guess it wouldn't exactly meet the low(er) power aspect though. I'll have to calculate out that cost to see how much I really care.

I'm thinking I'd go all in and get 2 Xeons (maybe not a rational decision), and I would ask for your input as I research this more, but a question for now - can I run 1 CPU on one of the Dual CPU boards? With the idea to scale later? Or, is that not possible/good?

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

Make sure you check the stepping if you want to have VT-d support. Some Xeon processors are known to have it in one stepping, but not the other. VT-x is generally a given for Xeon processors though, so while you should make sure the processor supports virtualization if you're going to use it, there's a lot less buyer beware type situations.

For sure. The ones I've got (from the linked thread) support everything needed for proper virtualization. Fantastic chips for the price.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by Tomahawk51

I am SERIOUSLY thinking about this approach now - 2 Xeons would be building for future use I'm guessing. I'm not opposed to buying used (but prefer new). I guess it wouldn't exactly meet the low(er) power aspect though. I'll have to calculate out that cost to see how much I really care.

I'm thinking I'd go all in and get 2 Xeons (maybe not a rational decision), and I would ask for your input as I research this more, but a question for now - can I run 1 CPU on one of the Dual CPU boards? With the idea to scale later? Or, is that not possible/good?

No issue with running a single CPU. The only thing to pay attention to is the memory controller and PCIE bus is handled by the CPU so not all memory slots will function and you may not have all the slots on the board available with a single CPU. This depends on the motherboard though so read the manual before making a decision.

My UPS states that I'm consuming 276w with the server and 3 directv boxes plugged in. I don't spin my drives down so I could save power there if I wanted. The server is busy too so it's not idle.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

For sure. The ones I've got (from the linked thread) support everything needed for proper virtualization. Fantastic chips for the price.

Very case-by-case I've found. And some boards with the exact same chipset may work and may not with a given hypervisor. The board I have was one of the few AMD based boards at the time that supposedly supported full IOMMU support, but it took 2 versions of ESXi since release for it to actually detect it. When I tried unRAID a couple months ago, I was very pleasently surprised that it jumped right in with everything working - but then it turned out I don't virtualize a single piece of hardware right now.

Honestly, in my use case, about the only thing I can potentially see using full IOMMU/VT-d support for would be to add a couple mid-level video cards for hardware assisted transcoding, assuming any of the transcoding jobs out there support it (not sure if the ffmpeg transcoding that openDCT does would, but I'm guessing with the right combination, it could be made to work).

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Honestly, in my use case, about the only thing I can potentially see using full IOMMU/VT-d support for would be to add a couple mid-level video cards for hardware assisted transcoding, assuming any of the transcoding jobs out there support it (not sure if the ffmpeg transcoding that openDCT does would, but I'm guessing with the right combination, it could be made to work).

I explored what was needed to provide hardware assisted transcoding. It's a lot more effort than it's worth and the best support is only on the Windows platforms. In Linux often you need a specifically built kernel depending on the acceleration desired; this is especially true for QSV. Also it seems that almost no one is using the live transcoding which did require a fair amount of time and effort to get working in the first place, so I'm not giddy about spending more time there on something even more complex. My current opinion is that live transcoding should be done on the SageTV side of things where improvements could also help with the placeshifter.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

I explored what was needed to provide hardware assisted transcoding. It's a lot more effort than it's worth and the best support is only on the Windows platforms. In Linux often you need a specifically built kernel depending on the acceleration desired; this is especially true for QSV. Also it seems that almost no one is using the live transcoding which did require a fair amount of time and effort to get working in the first place, so I'm not giddy about spending more time there on something even more complex. My current opinion is that live transcoding should be done on the SageTV side of things where improvements could also help with the placeshifter.

For me, it'd definitely be worth it. With more and more cheap android devices with spotty MPEG2 support, I'd gladly live transcode my cable and OTA if my processor could keep up. NVEnc appears to be decently supported in ffmpeg on linux and windows, and it's pretty easy to add a mainstream level nvidia board to a system and that should provide enough gpu for a few streams realtime (depending on quality). Just need to get one in my server and start playing with profiles and see what can come from it.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

For me, it'd definitely be worth it. With more and more cheap android devices with spotty MPEG2 support, I'd gladly live transcode my cable and OTA if my processor could keep up. NVEnc appears to be decently supported in ffmpeg on linux and windows, and it's pretty easy to add a mainstream level nvidia board to a system and that should provide enough gpu for a few streams realtime (depending on quality). Just need to get one in my server and start playing with profiles and see what can come from it.

I really think this effort would be better spent on the SageTV core transcoding instead. Then you can basically have your miniclient tell SageTV, I don't do MPEG-2 and it would only transcode it for that one device. I would much rather go that route since it's can be a complete waste of electricity to transcode every single thing you're recording ahead of time just in case you want to watch it and it's on a device that doesn't support MPEG-2. Also people with more than 8 tuners will likely be unable to live transcode everything anyway. You would also still have the original closed captions this way. You could even hook this into the media server, so you can connect via upload ID and tell it you would like the file to be written transcoded. This could even be expanded into running a render farm of some kind allowing you to use more than one computer for this task when needed.

If you're talking about profiles in OpenDCT, you should know there's a lot more that goes into GPU acceleration in FFmpeg than just selecting the right codec. I experimented with this a while ago and I found that everything I actually needed might not be available without compiling additional native code.

[Tomahawk51]

I will need to research this more on the unraid forums, but here's some options I'm looking at. Any input?

• Lot of 2 pcs SR0KX Intel Xeon E5-2670 2.6GHz 8 Core Socket 2011 CPU
  http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lot-of-2-pcs...MAAOSwv-NWZxoZ
  
  Would this be a good Motherbaoard? :
  http://www.natex.us/Intel-S2600CP2J-...p2j-custom.htm

Then to determine if I can recycle my Antec Sonata III case and fit this stuff
http://www.antec.com/product.php?id=...5022021&lan=nz

And if so, if a powersupply like this would fit. Not sure if crazy overkill, but thinking of investing for scalability if needed.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817139142

Ram - I'll figure that out later!

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by Tomahawk51

Then to determine if I can recycle my Antec Sonata III case and fit this stuff
http://www.antec.com/product.php?id=...5022021&lan=nz

I went with a rack-mount server case, with SAS cabling for the hard drives. Two data cables, and two power cables takes care of eight drives.

http://www.norcotek.com/product/rpc-4308/

[wayner]

How much server horsepower does it take to transcode MPEG-2 to H.264? It doesn't need that much, does it?

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by wayner

How much server horsepower does it take to transcode MPEG-2 to H.264? It doesn't need that much, does it?

It generally takes up almost an entire core, but that depends on how fast your processor is and what preset you're using. If you care more about having the H.264 format than how big the file ends up being, you can likely get 8 streams out of a good quad-core i7.

[wayner]

Maybe we are not talking about the same thing but why would you care about file size when you are streaming in real time, as the file won't be permanently stored, other than to minimize data usage?