[TriLUG] Ideas for Replacing Home Office Workhorse Computer?

[Ron Kelley via TriLUG]

Scott,

What, exactly, is the use case here?  And, how much $$$ do you want to spend?

From your email, it seems you want a server that runs a number of VMs with little heat output.  That can easily be done on a semi-recent CPU (e5-2600 v2), 64G RAM, and a free hypervisor (VMware, Linux with KVM/LXD, etc).  Lots of options to choose from...

-Ron


> On Dec 17, 2018, at 5:05 PM, Scott Chilcote via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> My home office computer is getting long in the tooth.  It's an
> all-aluminum mac pro from 2007, has eight 2.8 GHz cores, and has been
> upgraded over the years to 24 GB of memory and SSD drives.
> 
> I use this box to run vmware guests with vmware fusion, and with as many
> as four running at the same time.  It has been great for this purpose,
> being wonderfully quiet and with scant evidence of bogging down. 
> 
> About the only thing that I'd knock is that it puts out significant
> heat.  Since my office is on the south side of our house, I needed a
> room AC to reduce operating the whole-house unit from May through September.
> 
> Apple Corp decided that I'd owned this computer long enough in 2015,
> when they discontinued it from subsequent releases of MacOS.  VmWare
> soon followed suit, as their updates and releases no longer support the
> terminal version of the OS. 
> 
> The machine still worked fine until a couple of months ago, when it
> decided to start having random spontaneous reboots.  There haven't been
> that many yet, fewer than ten, but the writing's on the wall.  Guest
> OSes are not happy with having their power slammed repeatedly, and in
> particular those made by Microsoft.
> 
> I've been doing a lot of thinking about what to replace this box with. 
> I'm not in love with Apple by any means.  Their most recent incarnation
> of the Mac Pro is kind of old, and seems more appropriate for an art
> museum than a home office (as the meme says, change my mind! ;-) 
> 
> The machine I would like to get will be powerful and quiet, and not pour
> out a lot of heat when idling.  Some gaming-specific hardware comes
> close, but I don't have much use for the high end graphics or blue LEDs.
> 
> I'm wondering if I need to buy a new vmware license to switch to another
> host operating system (for example, Linux).  I managed to get one of
> these guests to run on virtualbox once, on my ubuntu laptop.  It was not
> particularly reliable, and I had to reinstall it after it hung once or
> twice.  That was years ago, however.  It would be good to know if
> there's a virtual host for Linux that runs vmware guests reliably.
> 
> If any LUGgers have experience with hardware and host OS setups that fit
> these objectives, please pass the word.
> 
> Many thanks!
> 
> Scott C.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Scott Chilcote
> scottchilcote at ncrrbiz.com
> Cary, NC USA
> 
> -- 
> This message was sent to: Ron Kelley <rkelleyrtp at gmail.com>
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