[TriLUG] Ideas for Replacing Home Office Workhorse Computer?

[Sean Korb via TriLUG]

For quiet and cool a modern server will do everything you need.  I'm a
cheapskate so I picked up a used HP Z620 with dual 2Ghz 6 core
sockets.  It runs a lot of VM workload without trouble but it... it's
warm.  Qiuet and warm.  RAM is expensive still but you can get a
package under $1200 and maybe even $500 if you get the right deal.
They are being unloaded from leases the last 2 years or so.  I saw a
z620 with 64GB on Creaigslist for $1500, it's a lot of power.  These
don't come with onboard video so look for one with a card or put a
spare in the pci slot.

The z820 supports more RAM but the z420 is a different box.  The z420
might be low power with a single 8 core socket.

That old mac is a work of art, maybe you can run a cluster of 80 RPi
Zeroes inside it?

I also have a Liva 4GB Atom that runs on a heat sink and it runs very
low power and it runs all my TV and day to day browsing.  I haven't
tried virtualization but it's interesting to see these make their way
onto the market and they are super cheap.  My Liva was less than $250
in 2015 so the RAM and capabilities and price may have increased...
just not to the level of your vintage Mac.

sean

On 12/17/18, 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: Sean Korb <spkorb at gmail.com>
> To unsubscribe, send a blank message to trilug-leave at trilug.org from that
> address.
> TriLUG mailing list : https://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
> Unsubscribe or edit options on the web	:
> https://www.trilug.org/mailman/options/trilug/spkorb%40gmail.com
> Welcome to TriLUG: https://trilug.org/welcome


-- 
Sean Korb spkorb at spkorb.org http://www.spkorb.org
'65 Suprang,'68 Cougar,'78 R100/7,'60 Metro,'59 A35,'71 Pantera #1382
"The more you drive, the less intelligent you get" --Miller
"Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers." -P. Picasso