New & Old server

morbidpete · Post by **morbidpete** » Mon Oct 21, 2013 10:56 pm

first off, Very mad at my self. Purchased a new Mobo LGA1150, But bought an LGA1155 CPU, Returning that and grabbed an 1150.

New Server (file server using unRaid Pro)
Specs:
Pentium G3220 3.0 Dual Core (low power, cheap, main purpose is parity calculations)
2x2GB DDR3 (unraid only supports 4 gigs max)
Gigabyte GA-Z87X
8x Sata 3 Ports and tons of PCI-E slots for sata cards
rocketraid 4 port sata 3 controller (hopefully wont bog the CPU down since I will not be using its raid functionality)
8x 1TB WD Enterprise
2x 2TB WD Enterprise (from current media server)
1x 500GB WD Enterprise
800W Corsair 80% Bronze PSU

On the fence about the 500gig drive, I plan on using it for a cache drive. Writes with unraid can be a tad slow. Around 30-45mb/s. And that is slower then my internet download speed. So the cache would really speed that up. And worse case I lose whatever was downloaded that day before the snapshot. I'll decide once I perform some test's of my own in a day or 2. Ill be copying my existing 3TB of data over to it once online.
Should have a usable space or around 9.2 TB (largest drive is always 100% parity and minus cache drive)

So just some babble and info into part of my new project

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Tue Oct 22, 2013 6:28 am

Here's one of 3 I built the week the pic was taken...
6x core Xeon
32 gigs of RAM
8x 15,000 rpm 2.5" hot swap SAS drives, RAID1 for first two, RAID 10 for remaining 6.

[IMGO]http://www.speedguide.net/~brian/elorahserver2.jpg[/IMGO]

[IMGO]http://www.speedguide.net/~brian/elorahserver3.jpg[/IMGO]

CableDude · Post by **CableDude** » Tue Oct 22, 2013 9:54 am

Like the wall mounted monitor, YOSC.

and the ESET display.

morbidpete · Post by **morbidpete** » Tue Oct 22, 2013 9:59 am

That thing is a beast, Virtualizing?

I actually have a similar one coming in tomorrow. Picked up a used HP ProLiant 380 G5
Dual Quad core 3.0 Xeon
Comes with 3x 146GB 15K 2.5 SAS, I ave an additional 3 146GB 15K 2.5 SAS and 2 200GB SSD SAS im going to throw in it
Dual gigabit nics, Adding another 2 intel gigabits
Also went with 32 GIGs as thats the limit for the free version of esxi 5.1
Will be moving my VM's to it from the old host. 1 DC, 1 Exchange, 1 IIS, 1 MySQL and 1 Untangle.

Buying nothing but rackmount stuff and my VM host was the last non rack mount device. (besides my cable modem and UPS's)

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Tue Oct 22, 2013 10:13 am

CableDude wrote:Like the wall mounted monitor, YOSC.

and the ESET display.

We normally have our e-mail filtering system running on that large TV.....we filter e-mail for businesses (much like postini/mxlogic/appriver)....so we have that up on the big screen just so it's visible and we can see if the queues are building up. You can see the dashboard page on that little laptop there...which just feeds the large monitor.

But when building servers I use that big screen.

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Tue Oct 22, 2013 10:17 am

morbidpete wrote:That thing is a beast, Virtualizing?

Yup. I won't do SSDs for server yet...I still see far too high of a failure rate. I don't want those 911 calls.
I do the same with NICs....I always put an extra dual port or quad port Intel in there. Hated the usual onboard Broadcoms years ago...esp with 2k3 server..but they've been getting OK lately.
I prefer to keep the edge appliance on dedicated bare metal.....that red interface all on its own bare metal. Something about exposing a hypervisor to the edge like that bothers me.
Yes the past 3 servers I did were all for hyper-V.....
I typically make a RAID 1 volume, pair of 300 gig drives. I"ll install hyper-v or ESX on that volume...and I will also have some of the guests system partitions there...so I"ll make C:\Hyper-V\HDD\ there for the C drives of some guests. And then for the big RAID 10 volume...I put the secondary and third volumes of the guests there.
This way the C drive and D drive of the guests are still on separate spindles...instead of all on the same single volume. Greatly increases performance.

morbidpete · Post by **morbidpete** » Tue Oct 22, 2013 12:13 pm

YeOldeStonecat wrote:Yup. I won't do SSDs for server yet...I still see far too high of a failure rate. I don't want those 911 calls.
I do the same with NICs....I always put an extra dual port or quad port Intel in there. Hated the usual onboard Broadcoms years ago...esp with 2k3 server..but they've been getting OK lately.
I prefer to keep the edge appliance on dedicated bare metal.....that red interface all on its own bare metal. Something about exposing a hypervisor to the edge like that bothers me.
Yes the past 3 servers I did were all for hyper-V.....
I typically make a RAID 1 volume, pair of 300 gig drives. I"ll install hyper-v or ESX on that volume...and I will also have some of the guests system partitions there...so I"ll make C:\Hyper-V\HDD\ there for the C drives of some guests. And then for the big RAID 10 volume...I put the secondary and third volumes of the guests there.
This way the C drive and D drive of the guests are still on separate spindles...instead of all on the same single volume. Greatly increases performance.

I stick the esxi management on its own V-Switch and Nic so it is not on the edge.
My untangle box was an actual machine, But it crashed. I had no spare PC's at the time so a quick fix was to virtualize it. It's actually performing better then the old box it was on (wan on a dedicated noc, lan side connected to the lan v-switch)
As far as the SSD's. No plans on using them for data, Strictly using the cache drive feature of esxi to speed up the VM's a bit. Like you, I have no interest in dealing with a dead server due to an ssd.
we have pretty similar ideas on VM setups it seems.

Do you prefer hyper-v or esxi?

I like esxi mainly because I dont need an entire OS running, sucking up resources just to run other VM's and it's free up to 32GB ( no vmotion or anything, But I dont need it)

morbidpete · Post by **morbidpete** » Tue Oct 22, 2013 12:17 pm

::UPDATE::

CPU came this morning. Perks of amazon prime. 3.99 for overnight shipping!

popped it in, Only have 6 1TB drived running now. already copying files over. Actually getting around 80mb/s (writes to new server) Way higher then I was expecting and lots of users posted. and it's still doing it initial parity check. So it should be faster if I let it finish first.

with the 6 drives my UPS 1500 Pro is showing 84 Watts of draw. Not bad I think

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Tue Oct 22, 2013 1:34 pm

I like certain hypervisors for certain clients.
For larger setups, VMWare has my trust, as it's a lean *nix distro so not much overhead. However..management is a pain, need to fire up vSphere client from another rig to manage it.
For smaller setups, especially where an office manager or some person at my client needs to "do stuff" on the server...the full GUI version of Hyper-V works well for that. They can sit down in front of the server and double click the console and it behaves just as if it was a local bare metal install. I generally do this for a box that has those needs, and only 1 or 2 guests. The Hyper-V role lightens the load quite a bit, it's stable. However...there's that need to run Microsoft updates once in a while...so reboot them all. Hence I keep it to just 1 or 2 guests.
For larger setups, there's the Hyper-V "Core" install...no GUI, leaner, pretty much command line only in appearance, and gotta admin it from a management client on Win8 Pro, sorta similar to vSphere client.
I haven't used the "free" version of Microsofts Hyper-V. But even the "pay for" version I consider free...with Standard Server 2012, you can run it in Hyper-V role and use its license for 2x guest instances! So ya kinda get 3x servers for the price of 1.

Easto · Post by **Easto** » Tue Oct 22, 2013 9:15 pm

I have no freakin' idea what you guys are talking about.

CableDude · Post by **CableDude** » Wed Oct 23, 2013 11:23 am

Either of you two (YOSC, morbidpete) ever have a client use the server as their actual workstation?

morbidpete · Post by **morbidpete** » Wed Oct 23, 2013 11:34 am

CableDude wrote:Either of you two (YOSC, morbidpete) ever have a client use the server as their actual workstation?

I have. 2 of them, I suggested against it and did not give them admin rights on it. But they own it and it's what they wanted

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Wed Oct 23, 2013 8:11 pm

CableDude wrote:Either of you two (YOSC, morbidpete) ever have a client use the server as their actual workstation?

(except of course for a Terminal Server/Remote Desktop Services) Not with my permission......nor any that I have setup (because I educate my clients). I have taken on new clients where someone used it as a workstation....yes with an Outlook e-mail client, and yes surfing the 'net, and running accounting software. JEEEEESH!

morbidpete · Post by **morbidpete** » Sat Oct 26, 2013 3:16 pm

Alright, Everything is up and running. Very happy with the set up. Will post pics tomorrow. Its been a very long week! The data migration from my old storage server did not go as smoothly as I wanted it to.

nightowl · Post by **nightowl** » Mon Dec 02, 2013 11:19 am

if you want low power do what I did. Got a cheap core 2 dual laptop (T9600 CPU) got 8 gigs of ram and put ESXi 5.0 on it and VM your server config. For storage Qnap 4 bay NAS, setup is expensive though.

For a cheap storage NAS box, you can use a older PC with opennas ( http://www.freenas.org/ ). Open NAS needs minimum 4 gigs of ram though.