I called a different system “the Once and Future” – Common, I believe, but now it applies to the original shared workstation from work which was and remains named Mallcom – Mallcom 1.1. It has long since been out of use at the office, but it has laid in wait in the basement, getting tinkered with occasionally, even overclocked long after its useful life, and the ‘saga’ of the massive, crippling problems surrounding mSATA device use seem to have reached a close.
A new, faintly interesting case has entered the scene. Also lifted from work, recently decomissioned from daily use, the body – chassis – of the workstation named Freeze has entered the Vault for repurposing and briefly the interest lies in the fact that it’s one of the triplets – three nearly identical computers used as shared workstations, and is one of the three workstations that used an H230 which, as it turns out, is actually a terrible case! It’s interesting because it’s awful, it’s interesting because I think it suddenly becomes less terrible if you basically just rip the front off of it, yet to be seen, and it’s interesting because it’s the first white case I’ve worked with in my recollection.
Yes, that’s it. It’s white, instead of black, or instead of black with red accents. And that’s the interesting part.
The point of the entry is to make notes before going to sleep too late anyway. The server may undergo significant changes. Even though it’s a known factor that the trusted server building community I participate in does not generally recommend ‘consolidation’ as a practice, I can’t avoid my interest in doing so sometimes. Speaking of the community, that’s where I found the deal posted that there was an Intel i9-9900k on sale for a reachable price and I reached.
I haven’t installed it yet though. I don’t really have anything available that’s truly adequate cooling, so I haven’t started the… upgrades? Yes upgrades but I consider it a little bit more of a lateral move… just because of how unnecessary it is and/or could be done many different ways.
The idea is to replace the i5-9400T (T = low TDP) with the i9-9900K (K = unlocked cpu multiplier for overclocking) which bumps the system’s available processing resources from 6 cores/6 threads to 8 cores/16 threads. There’s an available 32 GB of RAM to offer the system as well, bumping it from 16. That’s where we step into the realm of best intentions…
It is most likely overkill to have a Virtual gaming rig with a Geforce RTX 3060 GPU in it, considering that the internet connection should present a bottleneck to the raw available performance. But. It’s what I’ve got.
New VM becomes VM 1 – a Gaming VM with a 3060, and 4-8 threads devoted to it and 8-16 GB RAM.
VM 2 – the current ‘centralized’ VM, could potentially remain, with 4 threads and 8 GB RAM dedicated to it. Its general purpose nature could remain the same. However, there has become available to me a Radeon RX 570 4 GB GPU – an admittedly unbalanced trade-off for another separate situation which called for a semi-modern Nvidia GPU so that’s where my spare GTX 960 went off to. The Radeon RX 570 could potentially bounce the current VM from a sort of useful utility to a more full-fledged VM, since it would get graphics acceleration and be “truly” usable via Parsec instead of just over RDP which doesn’t, by default, utilize any graphics hardware acceleration.
Had been looking into that after seeing a mention of potential technologies though.
There’s then 4-8 available threads and 8 GB RAM available. At least two of those threads would go back to the host OS/hypervisor which is Unraid. Currently Unraid, for my purposes anyway, is doing fine with two threads and 8 GB RAM.
Even if I had the RAM, I do think I would maintain a dedicated Primary PC, it just doesn’t seem the thing to roll into the server as well, at least not unless I found the money for another chunk of RAM which I really don’t feel I can currently do.
I know there are other ways – even if I was set on virtualizing machines, I could use an available high thread count AMD CPU, two of which are lying around, and spin off a sort of hypervisior server, leaving the i5-9400T to continue on as it is. But I’m not sure how I feel about using a full Unraid license, which I admittedly do already, to be a hypervisior in a separate machine.
Never did figure out thing one about Hyper-V server implementation.
Even if Hina moved over to an AMD CPU for personal availability, PLEX wouldn’t be ruled out since a major, favored practice is to have a dedicated PLEX decoding PC external to the server and pulling media over network shares.
Also, I said I wouldn’t, but if the Daily Driver got changed or something, the Daily Driver “Skylake” could donate it’s own Geforce GTX 1060 6 GB. But where…
Also need to carry on putting the Gaming PC or VM on a separate VLAN. Need to change over the wifi and then inturn ditch the reasonably nice Archer C7 consumer grade router and finally move up to PFsense as I’d been intending to for a while. The wifi comes as a courtesy of a recently retrieved AC-Pro WAP and it returning home to me.
There are other thoughts for consderation. But I’m finally falling asleep.