[TriLUG] Ideas for Replacing Home Office Workhorse Computer?

[Scott Chilcote via TriLUG]

Hi Ron,

The servers I've had experience with were neither quiet nor cool.  If
that's changed over the years, at least for some of them, it's good to
hear and would like to know which ones.  I've built systems piecemeal,
but I'm not out to do that this time.

I want solid reliability and a reasonable amount of support. I work for
a small company and wear far too many hats, so I'll spare everyone the
detailed use case list.  The mac pro that I have would be spot-on, if
it  continued to be supported by the manufacturer and vmware.  Having
one that throttled down when the load is off would be a plus.

Thanks,

  Scott C.


On 12/17/18 5:10 PM, Ron Kelley wrote:
> 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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>

-- 
Scott Chilcote
scottchilcote at ncrrbiz.com
Cary, NC USA