- Jul 15, 2003
- 537
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Hi all,
I'm sysadmin for a small not-for-profit with about 10 employees +2 sysadmins (we're part time). We will soon have the opportunity to purchase new hardware with a 1-time budget, so I'd like to do things right. Currently all of our services and servers are a hodgepodge and provided by desktop class machines that we've scraped together. I'd like to change that in the future.
I see two possible scenarios (and would like your advice on which is better)
1) 1 linux file server, 1 windows application server (ie. remote desktop) -- also serves as backup space for the file server -- may also run exchange, and a couple of those linux-based Linksys routers running firewall and wireless
2) 2 identical, really beefy servers, each running VMware. Inside of VMware, we'd have an exchange/windows server, a linux server, etc. Virtual machine hard disks would be mirrored on both machines so that if one goes down, we could always bring up all services on the other machine.
What do you think of the different setups? What kind of hardware do you think we'll need? Here's what I was tossing around:
1x dual core proc, ~2Ghz. Opteron or Core2 (without starting a flaming war, any thoughts on which?)
2-4 GB ram (leaning towards 4, especially for the VM scenario)
2x250GB drives, maybe RAID mirroring.
Server class or workstation class machine (dell or HP, probably)
How many NIC's?
....I think that's about it, but I'll keep you posted.
Any advice you can offer would be most appreciated. I've worked in a Datacenter environment before (iLo, blades, etc -- the whole shebang), but never actually had to determine server requirements. I'm not really sure what I'd need to pull this off.
Please let me know what you think.
I'm sysadmin for a small not-for-profit with about 10 employees +2 sysadmins (we're part time). We will soon have the opportunity to purchase new hardware with a 1-time budget, so I'd like to do things right. Currently all of our services and servers are a hodgepodge and provided by desktop class machines that we've scraped together. I'd like to change that in the future.
I see two possible scenarios (and would like your advice on which is better)
1) 1 linux file server, 1 windows application server (ie. remote desktop) -- also serves as backup space for the file server -- may also run exchange, and a couple of those linux-based Linksys routers running firewall and wireless
2) 2 identical, really beefy servers, each running VMware. Inside of VMware, we'd have an exchange/windows server, a linux server, etc. Virtual machine hard disks would be mirrored on both machines so that if one goes down, we could always bring up all services on the other machine.
What do you think of the different setups? What kind of hardware do you think we'll need? Here's what I was tossing around:
1x dual core proc, ~2Ghz. Opteron or Core2 (without starting a flaming war, any thoughts on which?)
2-4 GB ram (leaning towards 4, especially for the VM scenario)
2x250GB drives, maybe RAID mirroring.
Server class or workstation class machine (dell or HP, probably)
How many NIC's?
....I think that's about it, but I'll keep you posted.
Any advice you can offer would be most appreciated. I've worked in a Datacenter environment before (iLo, blades, etc -- the whole shebang), but never actually had to determine server requirements. I'm not really sure what I'd need to pull this off.
Please let me know what you think.