Am I mad? Virtualize the lot!

Serephucus

How in the world did you get that lovely sortable table?! :eek:

As regards the build, I'd look at a 1230v3 as well. Very similar chip, but for €40-ish more, you get Hyperthreading, which would probably help you out.

If you're using PFSense, will you need a NIC as well? I'd imagine you won't get very far having a router with 1-2 LAN ports.

As for pre-builds, I have little experience with them. I recently specced out a dev server for the office, and AFAIK they ended up going with a Dell... PowerEdge something or other. They're nice because they have things like redundant PSUs and remote management, but they're not cheap, and probably more than what you need, to be honest.

You can get most of what's on offer with DIY server boards too. ASRock does a bunch of them, all with IPMI, which lets you access the hardware over ethernet (inc. BIOS, power cycling, etc.) through a web UI.

For table formatting, use the 'head' tag in your table tags (use [] not {} ) - {TABLE=head}{/TABLE}

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Lenovo TS140 Xeon E3-1226 v3 from ebuyer working out at only £225 after cashback!
CPU alone costs almost that!
http://www.ebuyer.com/670719-lenovo-thinkserver-ts140-xeon-e3-1226-v3-3-3ghz-tower-server-70a50022uk

Only 4GB of RAM installed, so will need to pick up 32GBs from elsewhere to replace.
Potentially here - http://www.cclonline.com/product/173722/KVR16LE11K4/32/Desktop-Memory/Kingston-ValueRAM-32GB-4x8GB-Memory-Kit-1600MHz-DDR3L-ECC-240-pin-DIMM-CL11-1-35V-Unbuffered-2R-X8-with-Thermal-Sensor/RAM2389/?siteID=8BacdVP0GFs-ms45roUloQkbv3G_236yRA

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pfSense is there out of a interest / pipe dream of sorts. Could easily not actually be included in the build!

Things like additional NICs etc I'm sure I've not thought out properly!

Forgot to come back and update this.

I went for the TS140 from Serversplus in the end. 24db and 35w idle.

It had Xeon V3-1226, 1TB plate and 4GB ECC unbuffered.
I added in my own Samsung 850, another 1TB plate and got another 16gb EEC unbuffered, another NIC and an eSata connection (annoyingly is low profile so doesn't fit).

Installed UnRaid (possibly easiest install I've ever done) onto a 'FIT USB' key, and am booting to that. 60 days trial is free, trial limited by #disks but I'm low there so no issues. If wanting to buy, will only cost $60 so nothing ridiculous.

Currently still trialling and testing everything and trying to break it as often as possible before making the full push to the 'hog & thin clients' approach, but at this stage nothing has broken on me.

UnRaid has taken care of the NAS element by treating my plates as a JBOD. I'm using the EVO as a cache drive, and installing the Boot drives of the VMS on there too.

Have messed around trying to get a couple of variants of linux working, Linux Mint with Cinnamon hasn't been a goer as requires GPU (recall, all connectivity is via VNC / RDP), but have working installs of Lubuntu, an xfce Linux Mint and an openSuse all running alongside a Windows VM (useful site - https://dev.windows.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/windows/). XRDP installed on each of the linux distros gives us simple access from windows. VNC also available when remoting in from linux, and there's the No VNC option that UnRaid provides when connected to the home network through any browser.

No performance issues seen with multiple users on the box. AutoCad / Photoshop performance over RDP is absolutely fine for what is required.

Video performance is shocking. AFAIK that's an RDP issue though. This wasn't part of my requirements however, as MXQ/Pi/MK808B+ style client pulling from the server should cover all of that.

Still have a fair bit to learn about using Docker instead of spinning up VMs (plex server as a Docker install instead of in a VM makes more sense), and still have some way to go before I heave all my media onto the disks in the NAS, but early stages are all showing promise that this is a really viable solution.

10 month update.

Fully embraced the setup at this stage. unRaid (basic - paid for it as works so well and wanted to contribute) runs everything great. No disk errors through 10 months. Parity drive there as coverage for if/when it all goes tits up.

Docker implementation within unRaid is great too, able to spin up RStudio docker images for data analysis within any browsers / any OS (no vnc/rdc protocols required), run a Gitlab repo as well as some SQL instances and Redis and Mongo too.

DuckDns docker allows me to access the server from outside the network without worrying about changing IPs. I've also enabled the unRaid DVB plugin, which means that with a simple USB DVB-T adapter and a TVHeadend Docker I'm able to serve all the Freeview channels to my MK808b+ libreelecs which means that screens are all that are required and you can give up using the TV's tuners.

Due to the dockerisation of many of my requirements, I've actually chopped up a load of VMs and now have a '.Net Dev' VM, a 'CAD Windows' VM and a 'All Other Linux' VM ticking away.

Port forwarding on the home router allows me direct VNC/RDC logins to the VMs (simply expose the correct ports to the server) from outside the network, and likewise I can access the docker applications in the same way.

Means I have a beast of a workstation available to me even though the client in front of me is my simple Chromebook.

Power consumption is tiny and noise has never been a deal - TS 140 was a great fit for this in retrospect.

Project worth doing imo!