What should I be focussing on hardware wise for unRAID server

[wayner]

As I am moving towards putting together an unRAID server I have a few questions.

1. What should I be looking for in hardware?
2. Are there certain CPUs/ motherboard chipsets that I should be looking for, especially if I will be running a few VMs?
3. How much do CPU speed and CPU cores matter? Ideally I will be doing some com skipping and perhaps some transcoding using handbrake.
4. How much does memory matter and how much memory should I use? I will want to run at least 2 VMs (ubuntu, WHS2011) and maybe another one or two for futzing around.
5. Will I be paying much of a penalty using my old Sage Server hardware, which is something like an i5-665 with a P7-H57 mobo? Or will I get way better performance using a newer CPU/mobo combo, especially when it comes to VMs.
6. Anything to look for in a firewire card that will have better support in Linux?
7. Anything to look for in SATA controllers?
8. If I am getting a new mobo should I get one with an M.2 NVME port for a cache drive?

[SomeWhatLost]

Originally Posted by wayner

As I am moving towards putting together an unRAID server I have a few questions.


What should I be looking for in hardware?

yes, the bigger and noisier the better
get a used supermicro case that supports 24+ drives... you never know when you might need them... or Norco...

Originally Posted by wayner

Are there certain CPUs/ motherboard chipsets that I should be looking for, especially if I will be running a few VMs?

XEON!!!

Originally Posted by wayner

How much do CPU speed and CPU cores matter? Ideally I will be doing some com skipping and perhaps some transcoding using handbrake.

both, but, cores, cores and more cores... dual/quad 16 core XEON's setup would be nice...

Originally Posted by wayner

How much does memory matter and how much memory should I use? I will want to run at least 2 VMs (ubuntu, WHS2011) and maybe another one or two for futzing around.

the more the better...
32G min...

Originally Posted by wayner

Anything to look for in SATA controllers?

yes... limetech has a wiki with list of controllers and how well they work (or not), I would definitely consider looking at said list...

Originally Posted by wayner

If I am getting a new mobo should I get one with an M.2 NVME port for a cache drive?

I wouldn't... but you can if you want...


of course, you should probably read my sig before taking anything posted here as advice...
and when it comes to these sorts of things, I prefer the overkill strategy...

[SomeWhatLost]

also, fwiw, you want a cache pool...
not just a single drive...
it is somehow better that way...

[wayner]

Originally Posted by SomeWhatLost

also, fwiw, you want a cache pool...
not just a single drive...
it is somehow better that way...

Why is that? If I am primarily worried about caching SageTV and my appdata folders would 2x128GB be good enough? I know it wouldn't be for you, but for us mere mortals with storage drives in the single digits.

And why won't a NVME drive make sense since they are about 5X times faster than a regular SSD.

[SomeWhatLost]

Originally Posted by wayner

Why is that? If I am primarily worried about caching SageTV and my appdata folders would 2x128GB be good enough? I know it wouldn't be for you, but for us mere mortals with storage drives in the single digits.

protection mostly...
btrfs that is used for cache does a raid 1 sort of thing with cache drives... ie 2 x 128GB ends up being just 128GB of usable space...

Originally Posted by wayner

And why won't a NVME drive make sense since they are about 5X times faster than a regular SSD.

just cause there (usually) is only one of them, and they are expensive... and I have generally blown all my money on other parts by then....

[wayner]

There is usually only one on the mobo but you can get a PCIe card that you plug into a slot into which you slide in an M.2 drive.

[SomeWhatLost]

anyway, the big thing for VM's really is cores & memory, once assigned to a VM they aren't available for anything else... so, make sure you have enough for what you want to do... and a little bit leftover to run unraid and dockers...

[SomeWhatLost]

Originally Posted by wayner

There is usually only one on the mobo but you can get a PCIe card that you plug into a slot into which you slide in an M.2 drive.

seems expensive...

[wayner]

Originally Posted by SomeWhatLost

anyway, the big thing for VM's really is cores & memory, once assigned to a VM they aren't available for anything else... so, make sure you have enough for what you want to do... and a little bit leftover to run unraid and dockers...

Can Sage use more than one core? Are you better off with fewer cores and a faster clock speed or vice-versa?

[wayner]

What if I were to use a PC with a i5-2500K CPU, 16GB of memory and an Asus P8H67-m EVO motherboard? It only has two 6Gpbs SATA ports but does that matter? Do mechanical drives saturate a 3Gbps SATA port?

[KarylFStein]

You're not worried about transcoding, right? When I spec'd my last server I wanted a CPU to be able to keep up with a certain number of transcoding threads going at once and (not sure if that's the proper way to do the spec'ing) used some Plex recommendations for passmark scores. I'm no expert, but I don't think you need to focus on maxing out cores. On my Windows machine anyway it seems to spread threads out across the cores pretty well.

I do not believe that unRAID forces you to fully block resources for VMs unlike e.g. VirtualBox. If I recall it let's you set which cores it may use (which are not exclusive) as well as min / max memory, but allocation is somewhat dynamic based on needs like Hyper-V.

For my unRAID cache drives, I decided how many VMs I wanted and their disk size, and added some extra for dockers. I don't currently plan to use unRAID as a file server, so didn't add extra cache for that. I'm running with a couple 240G SSDs (overkill really, but I had the parts already--also you want to keep ~75% free space on a SSD) and my VMs boot super fast. I chose 2 cache drives because it should give some read improvements and in the off-chance of a failure.

I haven't run any speed tests on unRAID, but at one point I took some I/O readings from my Windows server. It had 4 6G ports and 4 3G. At the time I was running RAID-1 pairs on HDDs. Read performance was pretty common across the 3G and 6G ports. Now I have SSDs in RAID-1 on two of the 6G ports and HDDs with Stablebit DrivePool on the rest. I've been meaning to re-run the I/O tests to see the difference, but haven't yet.

[KarylFStein]

FYI, comskip and Handbrake are probably the biggest users of CPU resources on my server. Since they seem to peg all the cores fairly equally, I imagine you want speed over more cores. But that's just my unscientific observations .

Another things to keep in mind is network bandwidth. If you have a switch that suports LACP, unRAID makes it really easy to bond multiple interfaces into one pipe.

[wayner]

I may be doing some transcoding either when using Plex or Handbrake. My current process actually passes off the Handbrake jobs to another PC on my LAN via SJQ.

Do I have to worry about bonding? Is network ever going to be a bottleneck? For a Sage server, even with an HDHR capturing two steams and 5 clients you shouldn't be using more than 150mbps which leaves a ton to spare.

[KarylFStein]

Originally Posted by wayner

I may be doing some transcoding either when using Plex or Handbrake. My current process actually passes off the Handbrake jobs to another PC on my LAN via SJQ.

Do I have to worry about bonding? Is network ever going to be a bottleneck? For a Sage server, even with an HDHR capturing two steams and 5 clients you shouldn't be using more than 150mbps which leaves a ton to spare.

It depends on your use case. I like having it on my file server which also happens to be my SageTV server. If STV was pretty much it on the server I probably wouldn't care.

[Fuzzy]

HDD's are going to end up being the speed limit for your server, so a single 1Gbps ethernet is likely plenty. I mean, if you've got a bonding ethernet adapter laying around, it is a nice thing to have, but I certainly won't see a necessity for it.

[SomeWhatLost]

Originally Posted by wayner

Can Sage use more than one core? Are you better off with fewer cores and a faster clock speed or vice-versa?

for sage alone, or just sage+unraid, even sage+unraid+comskip you really can use just about anything from the last decade or so... neither sage nor unraid use anything from a cpu or memory standpoint, and comskip is "tuneable", you can set it to play well with whatever you have...
It is other stuff where speed or cores become usefull, Plex, transcoding,etc...

[SomeWhatLost]

Originally Posted by KarylFStein

I do not believe that unRAID forces you to fully block resources for VMs unlike e.g. VirtualBox. If I recall it let's you set which cores it may use (which are not exclusive) as well as min / max memory, but allocation is somewhat dynamic based on needs like Hyper-V.

I am pretty sure it does, when I set 2 cores + 4GB RAM for my Win7/CQC server VM, they were no longer available for use in another VM...

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by SomeWhatLost

I am pretty sure it does, when I set 2 cores + 4GB RAM for my Win7/CQC server VM, they were no longer available for use in another VM...

Karl's right, you can assign the same 'Logical CPU core' to as many VM's as you like. That option is more about keeping a VM from using a core that you would like to dedicate to something than it is about locking a code to a VM. I mean, I have 6 VM's right now running on a 4 core processor, so obviously they can be shared.

[SomeWhatLost]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Karl's right, you can assign the same 'Logical CPU core' to as many VM's as you like. That option is more about keeping a VM from using a core that you would like to dedicate to something than it is about locking a code to a VM. I mean, I have 6 VM's right now running on a 4 core processor, so obviously they can be shared.

cool, I did not know that...
time to start randomly firing up more VM's... just need to figure out what to do with them all... love unRAID's nice & simple VM manager thingy...
almost as nice as the Docker thingy...