• Pfsense: 71 days
• Switch: Racked it a week ago
• Proxmox: 42 days
• TrueNAS: 42 days

I’m running it on one of these.

TrueNAS will be fine for what you’re describing, there’s no need to virtualise those services. You can install them from the app catalogue and they’ll run on the host machine.

The best CPU is going to depend on the workload. If you’re looking to host lots of not particularly strenuous VMs like webserver based apps, home automation etc it would be better to go for more cores and lower clocks. If you want to host gameservers, those tend to benefit from higher single threaded performance.

STH were probably using a testbench, not a server chassis with 3.3A fans.

It would all just be sitting on generic rack shelves since none of it is rackmount gear.

Generally speaking the important functions on storage systems are on add-in cards. HBAs, RAID cards etc.

ChatGPT is not effort and people can spot it a mile off, FYI.

You just got your last post removed for low effort and you’ve posted the same thing again with no more effort. Are you trying to speedrun getting banned, or what?

It’s easily possible to fuck with the fans if you know what you’re doing. Most of the time they’re loud because the chassis fans are trying to push air through heatsink fins a couple of feet away from them. Sticking active coolers on the sockets is a good way to calm them down a bit.

IIRC Nutanix use rebadged Supermicro servers. What size boxes are they, and what hardware do they have in?

I’ve always been a fan of running a router/firewall on bare metal. Don’t like the idea that bouncing my hypervisor for maintenance or a kernel upgrade takes down my whole network.

Configure the new one while the old one’s still up, then swap the cables over.

Why not Epyc, since that’s what they’re actually built for?

Not entirely true. The big OEMs like HP and Dell often use non-standard motherboards and PSUs.

You’re going to lose out on performance running game servers on lower clocks. I’m running mine on 2690 v2s until I can find a good deal on something a bit newer and that’s about as low as I’d suggest going for clocks.

Do you need the game servers to be part of the cluster? You could dedicate one box to them, install some higher clocked CPUs for that workload then use something lower powered in the other two boxes for services that don’t need so much grunt.

I’ve been hosting my own email server for 20 years. Not at home though, fuck trying to do it on a dynamic IP. Also fuck 123-reg for mangling my DKIM and making me think I was going mad.

Everyone should at least give it a try, if only so your decision not to is well informed instead of following cargo cult advice.

The machine OP linked has E5 v1 CPUs, which are a 12 year old Sandy Bridge-EP chip that’s hugely power inefficient by modern standards and tops out at 12 cores per socket. E5 v4 would be Broadwell-EP, which is still 9 years old but benefited from 3 more generations of PPC and efficiency enhancements and tops out at 24 cores per socket.

IMO, that’s as far back as you can go in search of cheap and cheerful hardware without shooting yourself in the foot on performance and efficiency.

£60

Guessing UK.