Looking for a build a PC to run Virtual Machines

[ksweb]

I am looking to build a PC that will run as a server to host four Virtual Machines via VMWare Workstation 17.

The VM's are not currently very intensive, I have them currently running on an i5 10th gen, with 32GB of RAM but going forward they will require additional resources and I would like to cater for future growth as well.

I would like to have two NVME drives, one for the OS and the other to store the VM's, then I am thinking of having two larger Hard Drives to store data that is not accessed that often as well as back up the VM's each day to one of these drives.

In terms of the motherboard, I think choosing one that supports DDR5 will give it a bit of future proofing as well as the higher speeds should add benefit when running the VM's.

Preferred Specs:

-- Intel Core i9-14900F (open to suggestions)
-- 2 x 2TB NVME Drives
-- 2 x 4TB HDD
-- 128 GB DDR5 RAM

No software licenses are required.

Can you help me verify my thoughts above and if possible advise on which components you should use for this build, my budget is R45,000.

 

[Qui_Illustrati]

With that budget why not go enterprise grade and more fit for use case?

Out of interest, what are the VMs running?

 

[ksweb]

Hey @Qui_Illustrati,

I never considered it as I just assumed it would be out of my budget. I am open to recommendations in that regard.

 

[mikewazar]

Okay firstly have a look at thiis:

• VMware is killing off 56 products amid "tectonic" infrastructure shift
• Broadcom Axes VMware Perpetual Licenses Starting the Journey of Increasing Revenue
• Broadcom Hands VMware Partners ‘Termination Notice’

If you still want to go VMWare, sure, but I would just go Proxmox at this point.

The VM's are not currently very intensive, I have them currently running on an i5 10th gen, with 32GB of RAM but going forward they will require additional resources and I would like to cater for future growth as well.

Can you elaborate on how heavily the current system is pushed?
Perhaps a 7 day historical just to establish a baseline of your current needs.

I would like to have two NVME drives, one for the OS and the other to store the VM's, then I am thinking of having two larger Hard Drives to store data that is not accessed that often as well as back up the VM's each day to one of these drives.

Great idea, but consider RAID for both the boot disks and the VMs pool, but as I said let's try and get a better understanding of what you're doing and what you'll need.

As for the backup, another great idea and can be done on the cheap. My approach would be to setup a simple Pi4/5 in an off-site location with some relatively cheap disks (again, consider RAID, even for the backups) that you can push backups to and retain even if the on-site stuff gets Thanos snapped. I would not suggest keeping backups on-site, but if not feasable due to your network capacity, I guess do what you gotta do.

If you don't want self-hosted backups, you can always rely on a cheap Turkish Google Drive subscription + rclone

In terms of the motherboard, I think choosing one that supports DDR5 will give it a bit of future proofing as well as the higher speeds should add benefit when running the VM's.

Preferred Specs:

-- Intel Core i9-14900F (open to suggestions)
-- 2 x 2TB NVME Drives
-- 2 x 4TB HDD
-- 128 GB DDR5 RAM

That is quite a jump and might not be necessary considering the rate at which components are progressing. Can you elaborate on current system util and potential expansion needs to better conclude on whether you really need to spend on stuff you might get away with using a Dell OptiPlex like my 10500T/64GB/2x4TB SSD running Proxmox. LXC containers are p light with overhead, but again, what is your use case?

No software licenses are required.

Refer to the first three links about VMWare. Are you sure this won't change in the near future? If you're changing things up, it might be worth changing over to a well matured product like Proxmox while you're at it.

Can you help me verify my thoughts above and if possible advise on which components you should use for this build, my budget is R45,000.

Carb is happy to help, just answer some questions above and the people here can guide you on what you need vs what your budget is. Often times people have wants>need>budget but this sounds like a budget>want>need situation

Mike

 

[Valheru]

With that budget why not go enterprise grade and more fit for use case?

Out of interest, what are the VMs running?

Like this:

[For Sale] - *Super Deal!* IBM X3650 2U Server, 24-Cores 48-Threads, 512GB RAM, 2TB SSD | Combo (multi-item) sales & full systems

Item: IBM X3650 M4 2U Server, 2 x 12-Core Xeon E5-2695 V2 CPUs (24-Cores 48-Threads Total), 2TB 2.5 inch SSD (2 x 1TB SSD in RAID), 512GB DDR3 Server RAM, 2 x 900w PSUs, 4 x Gigabit LAN Ports, 2 x 10GbE Ports with 10GbE FC Transceivers, RAID, Management Port Age: Unsure, but very good condition...

carbonite.co.za

 

[ksweb]

Wow, thanks guys I was not expecting so much great feedback and within just a few minutes.

@mikewazar, I am not against using Proxmox as you have suggested or any other Virtual Environment, I chose VMWare Workstation at the time as it as fairly simple for me to use considering my knowledge was (as still is) very limited in this regard.

Ok so more context is definitely needed.

The machine needs to be kept in my home office so space is a factor as well as noise.

I do some consulting work and and my main three customers have issued me with laptops for each of their organizations, and those laptops are use purely for work related to that client.

Since I still need to do work for my small business, at home I am running one main VM which I use for my own work desktop and that is running Outlook, Office, OneDrive etc. and I access this via TeamViewer when working remotely at customers.
CPU: 4 Cores Allocated, RAM: 8 GB


Then there is another VM is configured as a testing environment for some applications that I run at clients. Installed here is SQL Server (with +-10 databases), the applications themselves. I have a few VM like this which are different variations on how the application is configured, which makes it easy for testing but I seldom would run more than on of these variations at the same time.

I will soon be giving access to this VM to someone else for testing so it will be more utilized in the coming months.
CPU: 4 Core Allocated, RAM: 8 GB


The 3rd VM is running an application that we are still developing for a new business, it basically receives data from a few sources, then processes and presents it to a user via a web portal which is hosted on this VM as well. The portal is only available locally and not exposed to the web.

The processing of data is fairly intensive. Although now it is running on a small VM as there is just one data source, I am expecting this to grow the most in terms of resources required as the number of data sources and volume of data increases.
CPU: 2 Cores Allocated, RAM: 8GB


The 4th VM is new, I would like to virtualize my current development environment which is on another laptop, this VM would run Visual Studio, SQL Sever, Laragon (PHP, MariaDB, Nginx), Visual Studio Code.
CPU: Core i7 5700HQ, RAM: 12 GB


I have over committed the number on the number of cores allocated to the VM's in relation to what the host is running., but since I was just one person using them it was seldom for multiple VM's to have higher utilization at the same time but this is expected to change.

 

[Qui_Illustrati]

Hey @Qui_Illustrati,

I never considered it as I just assumed it would be out of my budget. I am open to recommendations in that regard.

Let me know if you don't come right. I'm actually contemplating selling my VM host server. It's a
HP ProLiant Gen9 with a D3610 Storage enclosure populated with 12x 4TB SAS. Becoming overkill for my use cases 😁

 

[Switch]

I have over committed the number on the number of cores allocated to the VM's in relation to what the host is running.

Unless you have a constant load running in all your virtual machines like say they are all doing video encoding simultaneously, the average ratio allocation of virtual cpu to physical cpu you can get is 3:1, so on a 6 core with multithreading you should comfortably be able to have up to 36 single core virtual machines (typically less 2 so 34 as you reserve two threads for the host). Of course this is workload dependent. Ram will be your main limitation.

 

[mikewazar]

Let me know if you don't come right. I'm actually contemplating selling my VM host server. It's a
HP ProLiant Gen9 with a D3610 Storage enclosure populated with 12x 4TB SAS. Becoming overkill for my use cases 😁

Drop me a PM I might want it

 

[mikewazar]

Unless you have a constant load running in all your virtual machines like say they are all doing video encoding simultaneously, the average ratio allocation of virtual cpu to physical cpu you can get is 3:1, so on a 6 core with multithreading you should comfortably be able to have up to 36 single core virtual machines (typically less 2 so 34 as you reserve two threads for the host). Of course this is workload dependent. Ram will be your main limitation.

Overprovisioning is basically industry norm even for big cloud providers unless you buy dedicated resources like a metal server or a VDS. 3:1 is conservative too. As long as the main node isn't redlining you can actually dynamically allocate a static [n] number of vCores and set Proxmox to manage the balancing with cpuunits or another function (there are so many now even I forgot... many ways to skin a cat)

RAM too, KVM can do RAM ballooning, KSM, etc (Dynamic Memory Management - Proxmox VE)

But ye OP, since this is business, you can be a little liberal with spending if you have a good accountant. Hit up @Dom as well as the suggestions provided here.

As for what you should upgrade to, consider urgency because from time to time there's a banger deal on a homelab style server that would suit your future needs perfectly at that budget.

Then on the topic of backups, what sorta connection do you have?

 

[Switch]

Overprovisioning is basically industry norm even for big cloud providers unless you buy dedicated resources like a metal server or a VDS. 3:1 is conservative too. As long as the main node isn't redlining you can actually dynamically allocate a static [n] number of vCores and set Proxmox to manage the balancing with cpuunits or another function (there are so many now even I forgot... many ways to skin a cat)

RAM too, KVM can do RAM ballooning, KSM, etc (Dynamic Memory Management - Proxmox VE)

But ye OP, since this is business, you can be a little liberal with spending if you have a good accountant. Hit up @Dom as well as the suggestions provided here.

As for what you should upgrade to, consider urgency because from time to time there's a banger deal on a homelab style server that would suit your future needs perfectly at that budget.

Then on the topic of backups, what sorta connection do you have?

I was pointing out that he wasn't over committing .

 

[souljazk]

I am looking to build a PC that will run as a server to host four Virtual Machines via VMWare Workstation 17.

The VM's are not currently very intensive, I have them currently running on an i5 10th gen, with 32GB of RAM but going forward they will require additional resources and I would like to cater for future growth as well.

I would like to have two NVME drives, one for the OS and the other to store the VM's, then I am thinking of having two larger Hard Drives to store data that is not accessed that often as well as back up the VM's each day to one of these drives.

In terms of the motherboard, I think choosing one that supports DDR5 will give it a bit of future proofing as well as the higher speeds should add benefit when running the VM's.

Preferred Specs:

-- Intel Core i9-14900F (open to suggestions)
-- 2 x 2TB NVME Drives
-- 2 x 4TB HDD
-- 128 GB DDR5 RAM

No software licenses are required.

Can you help me verify my thoughts above and if possible advise on which components you should use for this build, my budget is R45,000.

Is this for your personal use or for a business / client?

I've not worked with VMware in ages but can the OS and running VM's not be on the same disk? I know ProxMox can do this. Then you can use the 2nd VM for HA/failover/similar.

 

[Scrooloose]

I run 8 VMs on a 10th Gen i5 NUC with 64GB RAM and an SSD, on top of Windows 11 Hyper-V.

You can buy it for your R45k then I can go and get 4 more.

 

[Scrooloose]

Is this for your personal use or for a business / client?

I've not worked with VMware in ages but can the OS and running VM's not be on the same disk? I know ProxMox can do this. Then you can use the 2nd VM for HA/failover/similar.

VMware Workstation = Type 2 Hypervisor. ProxMox/KVM = Type 1, same as ESXi/vSphere.

However to answer your question, yes it can run the VMs on the same disk as the host OS. Splitting them is good so that you don't overtax your boot volume.

 

[mikewazar]

I run 8 VMs on a 10th Gen i5 NUC with 64GB RAM and an SSD, on top of Windows 11 Hyper-V.

You can buy it for your R5k then I can go and get 4 more.

Fixed

 

[Scrooloose]

Fixed

Way to go on missing my point bruv