My desktop/plex server is due for an upgrade next year. Maybe the threadripper price will go down.
Not sure I want to spend the money on a 10gb backbone or wait and upgrade the desktop. My UniFi switches and supermicro board can do link aggregation but my Asus mobo only has one port.
DAC is the most sensible option considering I need to go from my basement, up 2 more stories to my attic, and drop into my office.
With regard to USG the Dream Machine looks to be a kind-of-sort-of successor to the really old USG. I would guess a USG replacement is coming, but the Dream Machine Pro will have 10Gb as I understand it. They do product rollouts pretty horribly IMO.
Hardware BMCs have their place (e.g. low-overhead compute-cluster nodes, where free cores = profit.)
But, for most workloads—and especially consumer workloads—there’s no reason that the concept of a “Baseboard Management Controller” needs to be instantiated as hardware; you can just as well set the system up with a hypervisor OS (e.g. a minimal Linux KVM install; or an appliance-OS designed for this, like VMWare’s ESXi), set your regular workload up as one VM guest (and pass through to it all the nice hardware you have, like GPUs), and then set up another “control plane” guest VM that exposes IPMI management of your regular guest and of the hypervisor itself. As they say, “there’s no problem that can’t be solved with another layer of indirection.” ;)
(I should note, this is exactly the setup you get by default if you install ESXi [hypervisor] + a free home license of vSphere Server Center [BMC-equivalent appliance] onto a box. I was happily using this exact setup for quite a while, though I eventually moved to Linux+KVM+Xen just because I wanted the host to be able to create guest volumes from a thin-provisioned storage pool and then serve them out to the guests over iSCSI, as if I had a teeny-tiny SAN.)
Of course, this has only become a viable approach for IoT integrators very recently, which is why we don’t see any IoT appliances (e.g. NASes) coming set up this way from the manufacturer just yet. Until recently, your choices for building IoT devices were microcontrollers at the low end; old ARM cores in the middle; and Intel’s most “power efficient”, feature-stripped cores on the high end. None of these were particularly suited to hosting virtualization. But Ryzen is! While it may only be affordable to home-builders today, I expect to see AMD chasing Intel up on its “power-efficient embedded profile” market segment quite soon, with Ryzen-based, highly-cored, virtualization-capable equivalents to the Intel Atom line being sold for cheap enough to get system integrators excited.
But! The FreeNAS community is a bunch of grumpy sys admins. I’m considering going down the Linux and ZFS route. I’d be able to do more with VMs (I feel more comfortable in Linux vs FreeBSD). I’m building some IoT Pi’s to collect data and have it a Linux box would be nice.
The UniFi USG handles DynaDNS and my VPN.
- You generally don't want to run storage servers virtualized.
- Tooling matters. There are multiple reasons I generally do things the same way at home as I do at work (within reason).
- Probably a niche concern, but I have some hardware that is only configurable during early boot.
- Virtualization costs performance. Not a huge issue at home, granted, and you have to quantify it for your specific workload. (It is usually going to be IO.) But it certainly can matter with home workloads; home theater video processing is probably the most common.
I use both for what they're good at. IMPI is for managing hardware. Virtualization is for not needing more of it.
Not the op, but small form factor home servers are so excellent. Pihole, UniFi controller, Home Assistant (coffee machine warming up for 30 mins before I get up!), some testing VMs and a load of docker containers for various chores.
Not to mention that the better bandwidth (if they use a 128 bit interface like the MacBooks) should help increase their iGPU advantage.
I used the InWin Chopin case, which is too small for a video card. Here it is next to a NUC: https://imgur.com/l7dFKCl
This server is used for development and has an i7-8700. Unfortunately AMD does not offer a similarly fast chip with integrated graphics.
There are rumors of AMD building a NUC competitor, which means we may have more options soon.
My current build uses a core i5-4570s, but I'd love to have more cores & threads for running additional VMs. My use cases don't require _real_ server hardware (IPMI is overkill), just the ability to run a good amount of test and lab environments.