Server + HTPC

[talion83]

My current desktop is getting quite old and is ready to be replaced. I have been planning on my replacement being a HTPC for a while now. But I am also a server administrator and would love a virtualized test environment at home.

However, my budget does not support two computers.

What I am thinking of doing is building a virtualized home server running ESXi. I would migrate over my existing 2008 AD VM (which is simply running in VMware Player), add on another 2008 R2 Storage Server instance, and virtualize my desktop which would pretty much become the HTPC.

For the most part, I feel that an AMD Phenom II x4 or x6 should suffice. But I am leaning a bit towards looking at an Opteron 4000 or 6000 series (6000 obviously bumps the price up a bit).

I was hoping to get some opinions on if a Phenom could indeed support what I am looking to do. And also the feasibility of putting a mid-range HTPC video card into a server MB.

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Some initial thoughts I had, aside from the processor support, is if a desktop MB would require an add-on RAID controller to get quality transfer rates. Most server motherboards require ECC - which is fine if I want it to also function as a file server.

A few notes: as a 'server' it wouldn't see very high usage. I have a very simple AD structure and the main system it would be "streaming" items to would be the virtualized desktop on the same system. We do have a PS3, Xbox 360, and some notebooks floating around which would stream some video/music but not a lot. Really, the File Server would function as more of an archival situation than anything else (again aside from the local desktop).

Budget wise I am trying to stay around $500 ($1000 would be my cap, but I really would prefer to stay closer to the $500 mark).
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A few other thoughts/debates are if it is worth waiting until later this year - Intel will have fixed Sandy Bridge issues by then, AMD will have other competitive desktop level products coming out and an entirely new Server processor.

 

[mfenn]

You're definitely not going to want to try to virtualize an HTPC, especially not with ESXi. The virtual video and audio drivers are designed for basic functionality, not to provide high-fidelity output.

 

[kamikazekyle]

As mfenn said, toss out the virtualization if you're looking at a front-end HTPC. Now if it was doing transcoding/storage on the back end and another system was doing front-end display, that'd be a different story.

A Phenom II x4 or x6 should be able to handle the load perfectly fine, again ignoring virtualization. I have an old Core2Duo in a laptop that can do live transcoding of 1080p video to baseline and stream at about 5-7Mbit. It's also doing double duty as the HTPC. The video card handles the h264 decodes, while the processor handles audio, XBMC, and any transcoding that might be going on in the background. I probably wouldn't want to do simultaneous 1080p viewing on the HTPC and live transcoding with streaming to a second device, but even a Phenom x4 would up the ceiling so that would be entirely possible. I have a Phenom x4 at home, and that can do near realtime customized high profile x264 encodes. If I knock it down to baseline it's a cinch.

My file server (which doesn't do the transcoding, just is an AD server and NAS) has a noname software PCI SATA-I RAID controller with 4 7200RPM SATA drives. I usually run into more issues with the Athlon 64 processor than anything else -- it's running Server 2008 R2 on an Athlon 64 and 1GB of RAM on a desktop board. Even then, throughput is perfectly fine -- 50 MB/s random reads, up to 100MB+/s sequental for video files on my antiquated hardware. You're not going to need a special hardware based RAID setup unless you're doing many high def streams simultaneously along with other file I/O, and by that point you're probably talking about upping your spindle count or migrating to SAS.

Toss in an H264 hardware decoding video card, and you're good to go. You can easily do the build for <$500 without trying too hard.

In any case, if you're running on a bare metal install, you're set with a desktop motherobard, onboard RAID, and a Phenom. If you're dead set on virtualization, pick one of the two server instances to run in VMWare player (probably AD as that would have less I/O, is already virtualized, and be less affected by virtualization overhead), and run the HTPC front end on the bare metal install. While this won't be as efficient virtualization as ESXi, you can't get the output you'll need for a HTPC front end from a virtualized Windows server.

 

[talion83]

how about running Server 2008 R2 at the Front End and go Hyper-V route? By adding on a few features to R2 it should run equivalent to Windows 7 for graphics. So the base Server 2008 install will be the HTPC, and it can have the individual VM's running off of itself in Hyper-V.

 

[mfenn]

how about running Server 2008 R2 at the Front End and go Hyper-V route? By adding on a few features to R2 it should run equivalent to Windows 7 for graphics. So the base Server 2008 install will be the HTPC, and it can have the individual VM's running off of itself in Hyper-V.

Yes, you could do that. I believe as long as you enable the Themes, Desktop Composition, and Windows Audio features, then you pretty much have a Windows 7 machine except for the version string (which may trip up some stupid programs/installers). Don't take this for gospel though, I try to avoid administering the Windows servers at work if at all possible.