Following much searching, longing, and maybe even some drooling my wife agreed to buy me a used Dell R720 server. This was a serious upgrade to my homelab from the loose motherboard featuring a first generation i7 processor. With the upgraded hardware capacity has come the ability to get more in-depth with virtualization and the successes and pains that can come with it.
Some of the recent lessons learned after months of wondering why I was unable to get anywhere near descent storage performance and guest OS responsiveness:
- Install SSDs (or even better NVMe) for VM storage
- Within Dell Bios turn on Performance mode
- Turn off energy efficient network settings for the 4x network ports of the card (not sure how much this helped since I enabled performance mode at the same time)
Wow what a difference! Guest performance went from click… lag… open start menu to a much more “as expected” click + open in one smooth experience. I guess one benefit of finding this so late in the game: it feels like getting a whole new server all over again.
