I got tired of managing systems

After messing with GlusterFS for a while, learning it's ups and downs, I've determined that I'm moving back to a single physical node, for the most part. I had a few goals in mind when looking at hardware.

  • Enough CPU/RAM to replace everything I currently run
  • PCIE expansion. Lots of lanes for everything I ram in there.
  • IPMI! I don't want to have to go plugging in display/keyboard constantly.

This pretty much left me with 2 major system types to look at. Multi socket Intel Xeon's, or AMD Epyc systems. With old Xeon systems being even more work due to the absolute requirement of understanding UMA and NUMA and more importantly going through the steps of setting it up, higher power draw, and with that noise, I quickly ruled them out. I set my eyes on the Epyc 7551p and the Supermicro H11SSL-NC motherboard to cover every single thing I wanted out of the system. At the cost of about $700 USD to fully replace the core of my old system, I felt like this was a reasonable price for what all I get.

Specs

mainboard.jpg

Build issues and complications

Over all, this was a fairly simple build in terms of hardware. The Motherboard is mostly ATX standard with one exception (photo later). One oversight I had was not having VGA anything to hook up to the system when it showed up. The onboard video is forced to be the only enabled display by default, and I should have seen that coming. IPMI is also disabled by default, so wasn't able to even remote into it until I got a display out.

Turns out it's mostly ATX. Whoops, need to remove a standoff. standoff.jpg

The plan!

The current goal is to get it running on Proxmox to allow for easy separation of duties, and isolation of public/private hosted services. I'm planning on running something to manage ZFS and act as a SAN for the network, probably TrueNAS Scale as I have recommended that many times, and want to see what it's like today, despite knowing well how to manage a fully headless system. I'm pulling out a second gen Ryzen 8 core system of the network, so I'll also be creating a virtual machine to directly replicate it's place to make transitioning easy. After that, it's up to whatever I want. I'll be hosting a semi public Nix Hydra instance for friends since I have too much CPU grunt going to waste. I'll also be able to turn back on transcoding on my Jellyfin server as I know this should easily be able to transcode 4 or more streams while leaving plenty left for the rest of the services. After that, who knows.

What it looks like thus far.

setup.jpg