Advice on Xeon cpu for home server

[Iamrufus]

Hi people first post on these forums for me!

I'm looking at building my new home server, used to have an old Mac mini alongside a synology nas that held the storage for me. I'm looking to go beyond this now with an all in one custom build solution.


Not quite decided on the OS yet but I have a server 2012 license which I may use and go down the hyper V route and fire up 5-6 vms with things such as Plex, pfsense (not used before but want to have a play) file server and a few other bits. Also looking at unraid I like the idea of dockers but never used them before so need to do some reading on them.


I have a budget of around £700-£900, which brings me onto the xeon cpus. Not used one before but i was thinking if I'm going to be running a fair few VMs this might be the way to go. Been looking at the 1231v3 but I see that would need a gpu to hook up to a monitor for the initial setup. I'm looking to have around 3x3tb drives installed in a bitfenix phenom case so would like some kind of raid for piece of mind but again not to sure about the best way to go about it.


Would be really grateful for any advice on building this new server. I'm open to any suggestions on different parts etc.


Thanks all

 

[dave_the_nerd]

If you get a proper server motherboard from SuperMicro*, it will have built in video to use the iGPU-less Xeons with.

*and you really should.

 

[NeoPTLD]

Have you considered if you have a justification beyond just because? You lose all the reliability with Frankenstein machine you're thinking about but electricity cost is no joke when you just have server CPUs kicking around 24/7.