Server Hardware Recommendations

[lyinglowinwyo]

I'm looking to build a Linux server for light overall user load and a few virtual machines or containers. One would be a Samba install acting as a domain controller and file server. Another would be a web server with an Apache or NGinX backend plus PHP and Lucee. Another VM/container would handle database access, probably in the form of MSSQL. Possibly a final Windows VM.

My question is about components. How many cores or threads would you recommend? How much RAM? Probably 10 or so concurrent users on the machine as a whole.

 

[kanewolf]

SQL probably wants 8GB or more of RAM. Each of the other VMs are 4 to 8. 32 to 64GB would be my recommendation. RAM is always the limiting factor in virtualization.

 

[lyinglowinwyo]

Any suggestions or the number of cores/threads?

 

[kanewolf]

Samba/domain controller doesn't require significant CPU. Web server has more. Depends on the traffic load. Your database probably wants 4 VCPUs. An i7, i9 or Ryzen could all be acceptable.

 

[lyinglowinwyo]

I'm thinking 2 or 3 NICs?

 

[kanewolf]

I'm thinking 2 or 3 NICs?

How much virtualization experience do you have? Multiple NICs can improve performance of each VM if there is sufficient traffic. It does make it more complicated to assign VMs to specific NIC interfaces. You can get a quad gigE card for fairly cheap in the used market.