build a small home pc for XCP-ng?

Cottmain

I’m a hobby linux user and used to work in a support job … I hope you will forgive my lack of knowledge

I’d like to build a small home pc for XCP-ng to learn on and virtualise home firewall and other setup. It seems that not having ECC ram or a server may not be insurmountable as I’ve read about people setting up Intel NUCs and Intel cpu based Apple Mac Mini.

I’m hoping to have a smoother installation with less headaches but still have a relatively low cost machine

How would this work:

Network Card (http://hcl.xenserver.org/networkadapters/358/Intel_Ethernet_Server_Adapter_I350_T4)
INTEL Ethernet Server Adapter I350-T4
With SR-IOV

Intel CPU
Cpu and bios virtualisation capabilities (VT-x, VT-d)

GPU
(hoping to avoid the costly items in xen HCL)
AMD (thinking AMD drivers in linux kernel and hopefully can use workarounds to get PCI pass through as per Tom on YouTube)
(Possibly AMD 8gb RDNA2 )

Motherboard
Bios settings for VT-x, VT-d
try to get onboard Intel Nic

Q: Am I heading in the right direction?
Q: Should I avoid 12th gen CPU and DDR5 at this stage as they may be too new to get working (expensive too)
Q: As it’s a server based design I’m guessing there is no chance onboard intel M2 wireless will work ?

Thank you

AndreS

@Cottmain
Can you give more info on what you would like to do with the server (home firewall and other setup is rahter vague)? I have had XCP-ng running on Dell T20's, an HP Pro 6300 (desktop) and I am currently running it on an Asrock Deskmini X300. For me this works; memory is for me the most important resource and that's why the Deskmini has 64 Gb of memory. I use this setup as a testlab and host a few services that I expose to the internet for myself and family/friends. For me this works.

So what are you aiming to do? Maybe start here for the minimum requirements https://xcp-ng.org/docs/requirements.html#xcp-ng-system-requirements and take it from there. As long as you have enough storage and memory to install XCP-ng and create a few vm's you are good to go. Have you consider a second hand machine just to get started?

Cottmain

@AndreS Hi - thank you for your reply and your examples of computers you use.
I want to experiment with different setups safely and without hassle, and one where backup restore points are easily.
Ideally I will have

a firewall allowing access through different network card ports. (My understanding is that a ‘bare metal hypervisor’ gives greater safety when virtualising a firewall).
an obligatory windows VM
space enough to run different linux distributions (experiment with setting up Zerotier and things like that).
an Intel cpu that facilitates AV1 encoding of video
(I’m thinking there won’t be drivers for Intel wifi but I could run a wifi router with different SSIDs on different subnets being diverted to different VPN locations by the firewall according to their source IP)
… all in one home pc

Cottmain

@Cottmain
Is it pci pass through for an M2 wireless driver?
Perhaps Firewall is say Opnsense and it had say pci pass through then if OPNsense (FreeBSD ) supports those drivers and the card in hostap mode that can be done

AndreS

@Cottmain
Hi, no problem. We all started somewhere

For your setup I would suggest you either get somethig cheap so that if it doesn't match your requirements you can switch at low cost or you do some math and decide what you need and add enough headroom for the near future.

Make that list a bit more concrete and add some numbers for memory and storage. Leave at least a couple of Gbs for XCP-ng itself and some spare memory as you can't really fill up the server's memory to the last Gb. You might even get away with two low(er) spec machines.

If you want to make use of passthrough I suggest you look around at the forum to get some feekl of what is needed and what is possible. You will need a separate videocard if you want to pass it through and use it for encoding inside a vm; XCP-ng will claim one videocard. Also check the forums for network card passthrough and OPNSense/pfSense.

Flexibility seems to be key for you at this time. You don't need the absolute newest stuff but if you are investing make sure it can serve you the next couple of years; do keep an eye on power usage as a cheap old server will do all that you want but might add significantly to your energy bill.

Cottmain

@AndreS
That’s great thanks very much AndreS!