Advice in building a server

[cipher]

Hello everyone,

I have a rather peculiar situation. I currently live in a house which I share with 2 other guys (we are all students at the uni). All the three of us are IT professionals. I work with Linux/ Server management and PHP based web services development. I am also MCTS certified in .NET. My other house mate Zak is a sharepoint developer and my third house mate is an ASP.NET developer.

We were thinking of setting up a server in our house so that we can work on our respective work. But because our fields are so varied, so we are having trouble figuring out how to go about setting up a server. so this is the idea i came up with

buy a decently spec'd computer, run Vmware or Xen on it and run 4 different servers on 4 different virtual machines

1. windows 2008 server with MOSS (Sharepoint Services )
2. Windows 2003 or XP with IIS ( For ASP.NET )
3. Debian / Slackware with Apache/mySQL/PHP (for my work)
4. Windows Vista Home Premium for a media and file server.

I figured we could use a quad core processor with 8 GB ram ( A dedicated core for each VM with 2 GB RAM ). We have a 500 GB hard disk internally and a 1.5 TB external hard disk for data storage.

But I am confused about the processor/motherboard combination I should be using. There are just too many choices out there ... I am trying to stay within a moderate budget and still not compromising on the kind of performance we would need from all the four servers running at the same time.

Could someone please guide me as to what combination of CPU/Motherboard would best suit my needs?

Thanks in Advance


Regards

Ciph

[ameharhughes]

pop yourself over to aria and have a look at there boards, i think the best budget boards on there site are gigabyte and ASRock, this board suites your needs, i am using it to run my gaming server (left 4 dead and CSS) and also a small web host with DNS and DCHP.

aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Motherboards/Socket+775+(Intel)/Asrock+PENRYN1600SLI-110DB+650i+Sli+Socket+775+Motherboard?productId=30791

aria.co.uk

[PeterStoba]

Q6600 and this would be fine - http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Asus-...-Micro-ATX-VGA

Unless there is any other features you need such as raid

[ameharhughes]

unless im mistaken, he did say he wanted 8gb of ram and the board below only supports 4gb

and for the file/media server, i wouldnt recommend vista, use something else, like server 2003 and get some media sever software

[ameharhughes]

Unreal Media Server 5.5

its freeware, i havent used it but its meant to quite good

[Jiff Lemon]

What sort of budget have you got? You may be able to get a "proper" server from somewhere like the dell outlets.

[chrestomanci]

Is virtualisation worth all the extra faf that it will bring? Not to mention the cost of more powerfull hardware, and the licencing complications with microsoft?

I am not saying that Virtualisation can't be done, I just think that it will be complicated to setup an maintian, espacaly as each guest OS needs to appear on the network with an IP address. If someone specificaly want to gain experece in managing a Virtualised setup, then fine, but otherwise it is just extra trouble with little benifit.

Your visualised system requires fairly powerful hardware (~£500 I reckon), have you considered buying several old Second hand PCs for around £100 each, so that each person can have their own dedicated server, that they can monkey with without affecting anyone else. You can get a lot of PC for very little money on the second hand market these days, especially just after Christmas when Jo public has just upgraded. The only down side of many PCs that I can think of is the extra space and power consumption.

Many recent MS Operating systems come with an EULA that says that it can't be used as a guest OS under any virtualisation system. You need to pay more for a server OS that allows virtualisation. Have you factored in that extra cost?

[madman045]

£160 HP Server with a Quad Opteron CPU and 250GB - http://uk.insight.com/apps/productpr...#extendedspecs

Then visit Crucial, 8GB for this machine is around £80, gets you off to a good start.

[Boon72]

i'd recommend goin with separate servers, as the guy above pointed out.

save any issues in the future

[Moby-Dick]

Is virtualisation worth all the extra faf that it will bring? Not to mention the cost of more powerfull hardware, and the licencing complications with microsoft?

I am not saying that Virtualisation can't be done, I just think that it will be complicated to setup an maintian, espacaly as each guest OS needs to appear on the network with an IP address. If someone specificaly want to gain experece in managing a Virtualised setup, then fine, but otherwise it is just extra trouble with little benifit.

Your visualised system requires fairly powerful hardware (~£500 I reckon), have you considered buying several old Second hand PCs for around £100 each, so that each person can have their own dedicated server, that they can monkey with without affecting anyone else. You can get a lot of PC for very little money on the second hand market these days, especially just after Christmas when Jo public has just upgraded. The only down side of many PCs that I can think of is the extra space and power consumption.

Many recent MS Operating systems come with an EULA that says that it can't be used as a guest OS under any virtualisation system. You need to pay more for a server OS that allows virtualisation. Have you factored in that extra cost?

do you know anythign about virtualisation licencing ?

even if you run a non MS virtuualision product - you can run 4 virtual systems for each enterprise licence. if you go heavyily on virtualisation , you can run unlimited for each datacente cpu licence.

[Jay]

Is virtualisation worth all the extra faf that it will bring? Not to mention the cost of more powerfull hardware, and the licencing complications with microsoft?

I am not saying that Virtualisation can't be done, I just think that it will be complicated to setup an maintian, espacaly as each guest OS needs to appear on the network with an IP address. If someone specificaly want to gain experece in managing a Virtualised setup, then fine, but otherwise it is just extra trouble with little benifit.

Your visualised system requires fairly powerful hardware (~£500 I reckon), have you considered buying several old Second hand PCs for around £100 each, so that each person can have their own dedicated server, that they can monkey with without affecting anyone else. You can get a lot of PC for very little money on the second hand market these days, especially just after Christmas when Jo public has just upgraded. The only down side of many PCs that I can think of is the extra space and power consumption.

Many recent MS Operating systems come with an EULA that says that it can't be used as a guest OS under any virtualisation system. You need to pay more for a server OS that allows virtualisation. Have you factored in that extra cost?

There are quite a few errors in this...

Would you rather use old second hand £100 systems to run your software or a new RAID system to run them all?

VMs are made so if a server dies you simply boot in on a new server unlike the £100 systems

Most OS's can be VMd without any issues with licensing, data centre is unlimited! EE is 4 instances per license

I have recently started moving a lot of stuff to VM and I know that you can set each server its own recource so it will not effect anyone else on the server. It has a good use for our programming team I give them RDP to their own SQL server on 2003 Server and a few XP instances for testing and they don't even know that they are VMd. When they mess up the XP due to shoddy install coding (happens too often to be honest) I just reload a snap shot of the clean install and off they go again.

I find it much much easier to use VM than single servers, it can all be controlled from the infrastructure client, from there you can see everything just as you would with an ILO

Electricity costs are dow quite a bit

I have to say in my 11 years of IT VMs have been one of the best things to be introduced and with ESXi now being free its just stupid not to use it. I recently turned a job offer down due to the MD saying that virtualisation was poor technology and they would never use it.

The only issue is that there is no real way to tell if you can or can't use OEM software with ESXi, windows licensing is unclear on it.

[chrestomanci]

There are quite a few errors in this...

Quite possibly, it was just opinions based on half remembered facts.

Would you rather use old second hand £100 systems to run your software or a new RAID system to run them all?

That depends if reliability is important or not. Cipher said that him and his housemates where students and wanted a server to learn on. This implies that the whole exersise is for learing on, and that there are not many (if any) end users, and not much money involved. In that situation, capital cost will probably be more important than reliability.

VMs are made so if a server dies you simply boot in on a new server unlike the £100 systems

I know, they are great technology, but they are also an extra complication. If reliability was important, or if someone wanted to gain experience on them, then great, set one up, (or several), but if there is no need for a VM then it would just be a distraction.

Most OS's can be VMd without any issues with licensing, data centre is unlimited! EE is 4 instances per license

You just contradicted yourself, as you have quoted how many instances MS allows per licence. And how much does data centre cost BTW? My guess would be thousands, dwarfing any hardware cost. Can you get it with a student discount?

I have recently started moving a lot of stuff to VM and I know that you can set each server its own recource so it will not effect anyone else on the server. It has a good use for our programming team I give them RDP to their own SQL server on 2003 Server and a few XP instances for testing and they don't even know that they are VMd. When they mess up the XP due to shoddy install coding (happens too often to be honest) I just reload a snap shot of the clean install and off they go again.

I find it much much easier to use VM than single servers, it can all be controlled from the infrastructure client, from there you can see everything just as you would with an ILO

Again you are singing the praises of using a VM in a production environment, when there is real money and real end users involved. I don't think that describes Cipher's situation.

Electricity costs are dow quite a bit

That depends on how often the server(s) are switched on. If each student has their own, they might only turn it on for a few hours now and then when they are trying something out, but if there is one shared server, then the chances are that it will always stay on as no one will want to turn it off in case someone else is using it remotely.

I have to say in my 11 years of IT VMs have been one of the best things to be introduced and with ESXi now being free its just stupid not to use it. I recently turned a job offer down due to the MD saying that virtualisation was poor technology and they would never use it.

The only issue is that there is no real way to tell if you can or can't use OEM software with ESXi, windows licensing is unclear on it.

Again, I am not saying that Virtualisation is a bad thing. In the correct situation they can be great. When you consider the possibilities of moving instances between hardware, or changing their size to reflect load, perhaps as part of a day/night cycle of demand, or for hardware maintenance then the possibilities are great, but like any technology, they have their place, and they should not be used just because they are the latest new and exciting technology.

[cipher]

Hello everyone,

Thank you for all your replies. I am inching towards a Q6600 or a Phenom 9600 based setup.

MS licensing is not really a major issue for us since we are students at the university and our university has an affiliation with Microsoft under MSDNAA and we are allowed to download the latest copies of most of the software for free wihout having to spend for it.

The reason we were intending to work with a VMWare base solution is because we dont reallty have a lot of room to have 4 different servers and not to mention the resources to maintain 4 different computer systems. Using stuff like media server is going to put a decent amount of stress on the computer and I am wondering if using a second-hand PC would be able to handle the stress.

I havent still made up my mind whether to use VmWare or Xen for virtualisation, while I have only heard good things about VmWare, I am more used to working with Xen. And don't Vms automatically bridge the networking with the host computer? Wouldnt this assign them specific internal addresses on the network?


Regards


Cipher

[Moby-Dick]

the networking is very flexible with ESXi - you can create an internal vswitch connected to a VM acting as a NAT router if you wished. if if you had a vswitch with uplinks to the rest of your network , you simply connect the VM's to that.

free as ESXi is , its got a reasonably strict HCL which thankfully is easy to use.
http://www.vmware.com/resources/comp...ategory=server

for a small server , IO is quite likely to be the bottleneck , depending on how heavily you load the system , so plan it carefully.

Looking at your planned workloads...

1. windows 2008 server with MOSS (Sharepoint Services )
I assume this is going to be a small dev setup - MOSS can be quite heavy weight , but it does depends on what you want to use it for

2. Windows 2003 or XP with IIS ( For ASP.NET )
nice and easy - single vcpu with 1Gb of memory will be more than enough
3. Debian / Slackware with Apache/mySQL/PHP (for my work)
I've virtualised a few linux hosts , not quite as straightforward as windows , but you may be able to make use of the paravirtualisation options available
4. Windows Vista Home Premium for a media and file server.
seriously consider having your media & files on a different array/physical drive to the VM's


chuck as much memory as you can fit into your host - 8Gb should do you nicely ( I dont like to overcomit memory , although you can do if not all your workloads will be busy at once. )