[TriLUG] Ideas for Replacing Home Office Workhorse Computer?

[John Franklin via TriLUG]

On Dec 17, 2018, at 5:05 PM, Scott Chilcote via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
> 
> 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.

That was still in the era of Apple’s weird 32-bit EFI.  Full specs are here, for those interested:

	https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_pro/specs/mac-pro-eight-core-3.0-specs.html

I’ve got one from around the same time.  IIRC, the EFI limited it’s ability to boot 64-bit kernels, even though it could handle 64-bit otherwise.

> [snip: Used for VMWare Fusion, hot, but quiet.  Apple stopped support, now starting to flake. ]

> 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! ;-) 

Yeah, you’re not alone there.  When I first saw it, I thought it had nice specs, the thermal design was impressive, but it excluded an entire class of customers: those with large FC SANs used in video production.  Macs do support Fibre Channel (there is a tab for it in the System Info report), but there’s no place to put the FC adapter in those Mac Pros.

The SSD isn’t a standard SSD.  Upgrades exist, but you have to buy them from Mac specialty shops like OWC [1], and installing an upgrade risks breaking the SSD’s socket.

[1] https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/mac-pro/2013

That said, I do use one, and it is very quiet.  For your use case, I don’t recommend it.

> 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.

With power comes heat.  The Mac Pro’s chip has a TDP of 150W.  Ouch, that’s hot.  

The good news is the last decade or so of chip design has been all about performance per watt, not raw GHz.  Compare that chip to anything recent [2], and you’ll find lots of options at the same or lower TDP with 2x to 3x the performance.

[2] https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/26487/IntelR-XeonR-CPU-----------X5365----300GHz

> 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.

The vmdk disk files can be converted to other formats, including raw, and qcow2.  I forget the commands, but a quick online search will find them.  Attaching them as the boot drives for a new instance is doable in pretty much any VM server, including Xen, kvm, and VirtualBox.  Details vary.  Again, a quick online search will point the way.

I’ve used all four: Xen, kvm, VirtualBox, and VMWare Fusion.  For my primary work, I create Fusion VMs

Long ago, like around 2009 or 2010, I had problems on my MacBook Pro running both VirtualBox and VMWare Fusion at the same time.  They both assumed they would be the only ones to nab the virtualization CPU extensions, they overwrote each other’s VM page tables or something, and crashed the Mac.  It wasn’t long before a patch from one or both of them fixed it that bug.

> If any LUGgers have experience with hardware and host OS setups that fit
> these objectives, please pass the word.

I had a PowerEdge 2800 III in my basement office for years.  Two four-core Xeons, eight hot-swappable drive bays, and 24GB of RAM, it made a good VM server.  Downsides: the PERC RAID controller could only handle a max of 2TB drives (not a problem when I first bought it), and it was a level of fan noise you'd expect in your typical datacenter.

When I finally decommissioned it, I replaced it with a Dell Ryzen 1700X-based tower with liquid cooling.  Wow, was that a difference in noise level.  I can hear it if I stress the machine, but it is still quieter than the house A/C.  I use it with Debian and kvm for an in-house VM lab.

More recently, I’ve deployed a PowerEdge T130 in an office environment.  It has the noise level you’re looking for, but Dell removed NVMe booting from the firmware entirely. [3]. NVMe PCIe cards just don’t show up as boot options, and there are no M.2 sockets on the MB.

[3] https://www.dell.com/community/PowerEdge-HDD-SCSI-RAID/PowerEdge-T130-NVME-boot/m-p/5119421/highlight/true#M46199

HP has their ML30 line that are also office-quiet, and do support NVMe add-on cards.  A couple reviews of the ML30 gen9 systems claim under 40dB.  Even if they’re wrong by a bit, that’s still quieter than a Bosh dishwasher.  This will likely be my next office-space VM server.

jf
-- 
John Franklin
franklin at elfie.org