edamiga1 1 Posted January 13, 2014 Looking to upgrade my Hyper-V 2008 to 2012 R2 and waned to build out a new machine. Looking for recommendations for motherboard, CPU, memory. Plan to install Hyper-V 2012 R2 and use my existing case, power supply, and drives. Need at least 10 drive connections or buy a card. No raid, use software raid. Basically want state of the art CPU, but don't need all the possible power. Power consumption is important. I mainly run homeserver, media server, dev box. Movie conversion and streaming are the bigge3st loads. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
pcdoc 114 Posted January 14, 2014 Looking to upgrade my Hyper-V 2008 to 2012 R2 and waned to build out a new machine. Looking for recommendations for motherboard, CPU, memory. Plan to install Hyper-V 2012 R2 and use my existing case, power supply, and drives. Need at least 10 drive connections or buy a card. No raid, use software raid. Basically want state of the art CPU, but don't need all the possible power. Power consumption is important. I mainly run homeserver, media server, dev box. Movie conversion and streaming are the bigge3st loads. I have been happy with my choice for VM. It has run everything I have thrown at it. Add to it the storage you want and you are good to go. New VM Server (58 Watts)Haswell I5-4570S Asus Z87M-Plus 1150 Motherboard 32 Gig of DDR3 1600 2 x 60 Gig Intel 520 SSD in a mirror 2 x 300 Gig 10K WD WD VelociRaptor WD3000HLHX in a RAID 0 Cooler Master 600W 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Jason 73 Posted January 14, 2014 Always tempted to rebuild my WHS box w newer hardware. Love the idea of going from a Core i5 Ivy Bridge to Haswell but probably not enough of a performance gain to be worthwhile. I suppose if I was going from Sandy Bridge to Haswell and skipping a generation it would be different. Currently have 16 GB in my WSE12 box. Might bump up RAM for fun. Someday I'll jump to WSE12 R2 with Hyper-V but using a simple VMWAre setup now. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
pcdoc 114 Posted January 15, 2014 Always tempted to rebuild my WHS box w newer hardware. Love the idea of going from a Core i5 Ivy Bridge to Haswell but probably not enough of a performance gain to be worthwhile. I suppose if I was going from Sandy Bridge to Haswell and skipping a generation it would be different. Currently have 16 GB in my WSE12 box. Might bump up RAM for fun. Someday I'll jump to WSE12 R2 with Hyper-V but using a simple VMWAre setup now. You are right the performance bump is not really worth it even from sandy bridge unless you are upgrading for other reasons or repurposing hardware which is what I did. I needed to move my I5 for my other half so that gave me the justification I needed to upgrade (any excuse works for me). Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
adsboel 9 Posted February 1, 2014 (edited) a cheap options is microserver gen8. Its highly recommended and upgradable. If your not the big consummer of discspace or you are fine with using your existing storage, you go for a tiny footprint Intel NUC or Gigabyte Brix which comes with the latest haswell. Anyways, running both ancient N36L and Gen8 Microservers, I can recommend you to get anything. Evn the old one is fine for experimenting and anything above standard configuration(a 2.2 ghz dual core celeron) is sortof overkill unless you do some serious computing. I purposly bought HP Microserver Gen8 for Hyper-V 2012 Core and didnt regret it. But any hardware will do, just remember a home built easily creeps up in cost without giving you remote access like ILO. Another interresting find is, that Windows activation is not affected by CPU upgrades, so you can start small and get your system on steriods at a later point in time. regards Brian Edited February 1, 2014 by adsboel Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
kappclark 1 Posted February 4, 2015 Hyper-v server 2012R2 (free download) Using it as a 2012R2 host for 7 VM's...built in Nov, and was about the same price .. more room to grow. Hyper-V Box Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
HellDiverUK 99 Posted February 4, 2015 a cheap options is microserver gen8. Its highly recommended and upgradable. If your not the big consummer of discspace or you are fine with using your existing storage, you go for a tiny footprint Intel NUC or Gigabyte Brix which comes with the latest haswell. Nice to see you read the OP, and took notice of the 10 drive requirement. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
cskenney 150 Posted February 5, 2015 Nice to see you read the OP, and took notice of the 10 drive requirement. It's often easy to gloss over or forget those details when you are eager to share some ideas and contribute to the conversation. I don't think it really detracted from the discussion other than it probably doesn't address the original needs. 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Dave 411 Posted February 5, 2015 Agree CSK. That comment was required. -1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
kappclark 1 Posted February 5, 2015 Hyper-v server 2012R2 (free download) Using it as a 2012R2 host for 7 VM's...built in Nov, and was about the same price .. more room to grow. Hyper-V Box OK - with 10 drives and state of art processor, he can forget my sub- $500 box for a small home lab ... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
