Trying to build SFF Server, advice/help needed

[scsi stud]

I need some advice/help on picking the right components to build a very tiny Windows Server 2008-driven server. I don't even know if people make small form factor servers or not, but I wanted to see if I can get pointed in the right direction as to ideal Case/PSU combo, motherboard, etc.

Is this even a common request? I want a server for my house that takes up very little space, yet I am able to run Server-oriented applications on it.

I wanted to get some insight on ideal hardware to put inside of it, and other hints/tips.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[Chapbass]

Well, most applications are just dependant on the OS...and you can install server 2008/08 R2 on just about any hardware...

What type of server are you thinking? do you need a lot of power? fast IO? tons of storage?

PS: Nice Lurking.

 

[scsi stud]

Hehe, thanks for the reply. I will be using it for file storage/access, media and software development tools (source control, etc.).

What do you think?


Sent from my Lumia 900 using Board Express

 

[vshah]

big limitation will be expandability of storage space.

why the need for it to be sff? can't hide it in a closet somewhere?

hardware wise a matx board with a decent i3 should be just fine. make sure you have a couple expansion slots for adding sata controllers if you ever want to add more HDDs

 

[Puddle Jumper]

These cases might be worth looking at if you want space for plenty of drives in a Mini ITX system

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811112265

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811112339

 

[Chapbass]

big limitation will be expandability of storage space.

why the need for it to be sff? can't hide it in a closet somewhere?

hardware wise a matx board with a decent i3 should be just fine. make sure you have a couple expansion slots for adding sata controllers if you ever want to add more HDDs

Yep, it all depends on what kind of storage you need. If 1TB or something along those lines would suffice, then you could do a very small form factor machine with a laptop hard drive.

Something like Aopen's Digital Engine line: http://www.logicsupply.com/products/de67_ha

Just an example. Going that small (6"x6"x2") is going to be expensive though (probably around 1000). If you have room to go bigger, do that, as you can then use standard desktop parts and have no issue. This would include hard drives, for example if you could go slightly bigger you could squeeze 2 3.5" hdd's in there, which could give you 4, 6, or even 8TB if you really needed it... If you could go bigger still you could do it even cheaper.

Really need more details as far as how small you need and how much space you need. With notebook processors getting as powerful as they are, the speed isn't the killer, its the storage.

 

[Jimmah]

These cases might be worth looking at if you want space for plenty of drives in a Mini ITX system

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811112265

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811112339

I second the Q25B, I have one as my server and it's holds a stupid amount of drives for it's size. Build quality is very good, and it's easy to assemble. I have an E350 with 4gb DDR3, 4 port pci-e sata card, 8 3.5" drives (twin 80gb drives are on bottom mounting plate with double sided tape keeping them together).

Runs Server 2008 R2 with low load, mostly file sharing/downloading/streaming/murmur.

 

[scsi stud]

Thanks for the replies. My primary use for the server will be:

1) File storage/access (includes photos, media streaming, etc.) - ideally I want to use this as my main source of media and I will want to have this in a RAID (mirror) type environment in case one of the HDs goes bad.

2) Software development - put a source control server on this machine so I can access it from multiple machines.

3) whatever else I think would be necessary after the fact.. this can be other tools/applications, whatever comes to mind in the future.

The reason I want to have it small is in case I end up moving it around the house.. also, I have numerous other machines that are taking up way too much space, so I just wanted something that's hardly noticeable.

I have a 300GB Velociraptor that isn't being used right now, and I was thinking to get two 1-1.5 TB drives (in mirror RAID) to store all my photos, videos, archives, etc.

Let me know what you guys think.

 

[PCTC2]

Since your server won't be very compute intensive (storage and source-control software, media streaming, etc), then I suggest you get something like this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813182234
in this case (the PC-Q25B linked above)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811112339

I suggest this board for 3 reasons.
1) It's Atom. It'll save you power.
2) It has PCIe. If you want a RAID card eventually, you can get one.
3) It has KVM-over-IPMI. This means you can shove your server in a corner somewhere without a monitor. If you need to access it and for some reason SSH/VNC/RDP/etc is not responding, you can access the separate IPMI system and launch a remote Java applet to control, power cycle, etc. It runs off a little ARMv7 system that shares the first gigabit port. The KVM-over-IPMI is also useful for BIOS access/etc when SSH/VNC aren't running.

 

[Chapbass]

Since your server won't be very compute intensive (storage and source-control software, media streaming, etc), then I suggest you get something like this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813182234
in this case (the PC-Q25B linked above)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811112339

I suggest this board for 3 reasons.
1) It's Atom. It'll save you power.
2) It has PCIe. If you want a RAID card eventually, you can get one.
3) It has KVM-over-IPMI. This means you can shove your server in a corner somewhere without a monitor. If you need to access it and for some reason SSH/VNC/RDP/etc is not responding, you can access the separate IPMI system and launch a remote Java applet to control, power cycle, etc. It runs off a little ARMv7 system that shares the first gigabit port. The KVM-over-IPMI is also useful for BIOS access/etc when SSH/VNC aren't running.

+1, looks pretty solid from over here. Atom will save you tons of juice, and while its not the biggest speedster on the block (quite the opposite), for what its doing a lot of the time (sitting there idling), you're playing to its strengths more.

Mini-ITX gives you lots of options if you want more power, but if its going to be basically a control/file server, I don't think that would be bad.

 

[heymrdj]

Doing servers for a living, I can't stress enough how much of a godsend KVM over IMPI is even in the consumer space. Just the few times you need it pays for itself vs having to bench the thing every time something is going wrong to see whats going wrong. Plus it's out of band so the server can be frozen to heck and back and you can still access it!

 

[Puddle Jumper]

The features on that board are nice but you could easily get a Sandy Bridge Celeron + Mini ITX board for half the price and only a small increase in power usage. For the same money you could get a 35w Core i3 2100T based system as well.

 

[PCTC2]

The features on that board are nice but you could easily get a Sandy Bridge Celeron + Mini ITX board for half the price and only a small increase in power usage. For the same money you could get a 35w Core i3 2100T based system as well.

See heymrdj's post. (Cliffs at end).

The reason I would recommend it over any ITX board is for the KVM-over-IP. There are mATX Supermicro Skt 1155 boards with IPMI that handle Celeron Sandy Bridge. Then you could easily get something like the TJ08-E for a case. But that's an increase in size and cost.

However, for what he's doing, he doesn't need the extra processing power. He needs something he can shove in a corner and do its job. If you don't have KVM-over-IP and it's a headless server, it means getting out the crash cart (or equivalent). With KVM-over-IP, as heymrdj points out, even if the server is hanging, you can still access the IPMI.

There are no Socket 1155 boards that are mITX and have IPMI that I know of. I would recommend those if there were. But he doesn't need the processing power and the extra $100 is easily justified in the IPMI for SERVER use.

TL;DR:
1) IPMI
2) IPMI
3) IPMI

 

[scsi stud]

Thanks for all the suggestions, I appreciate it. Do you still recommend I go the Atom route if I were to also use SQL Server on it? Nothing too intensive but just put a DB server on there so alongside the software development tools.

In addition, for the future, does that Atom motherboard support any newer/better CPUs if I wanted to upgrade that portion?

Lastly, what if I wanted to run something like ESX Server so I can run Windows 2008 Server in addition to Ubuntu or something? I see the maximum memory on this is 4GB..not sure if that would be enough for a setup like this.

 

[Chapbass]

Thanks for all the suggestions, I appreciate it. Do you still recommend I go the Atom route if I were to also use SQL Server on it? Nothing too intensive but just put a DB server on there so alongside the software development tools.

In addition, for the future, does that Atom motherboard support any newer/better CPUs if I wanted to upgrade that portion?

Lastly, what if I wanted to run something like ESX Server so I can run Windows 2008 Server in addition to Ubuntu or something? I see the maximum memory on this is 4GB..not sure if that would be enough for a setup like this.

I guess one question is, how important is impi for YOU? Do you not care that you'll have to plug things into the machine if something happens to it and you need to work on it?

If not, then you get a ton more options. Honestly, from this post it sounds like you want something a little beefier than an atom processor. As far as ESX, I would probably just do VMWare player and have a server 2008 r2 box, then vmware player inside of it running ubuntu. Get into ESX then you have to start looking at compatibility for everything.

I guess the big question for you is this: Whats your price range, and how important is having out of band management? if that second one isn't a big deal, then I would look into a sandy bridge mini-itx board, and (depending on your budget) some sort of socket 1155 processor. Even the dual core celerons aren't too bad anymore. Plus, doing that, you up your ram options by a bit.

For example: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819115077 would give you a lot more options, and that MB can do either 8gb of ram (2x4gb) or 16gb if you really wanted (2x8gb, though thats expensive and probably not needed for what you're doing).

You lose out of band management, but you do gain a lot of power. I don't think we were thinking you were going to use this for things like SQL or virtualization, which even at a light load, will overpower an atom chip IMO. If you can swing that i3 + mb + 8gb of ram, you'll be totally set.


If you could give us a price point that would help a lot (unless I missed it?).

 

[scsi stud]

Honestly, IPMI sounds like a great feature, but if I don't have it I'm not going to lose sleep. I don't envision this machine having problems, and when it does I can simply hook up one of my monitors and keyboards/mice to it to troubleshoot.

So it sounds like I should get a system that's fast/powerful enough to run Windows Server 2008 with VMWare Player (Ubuntu), so probably 8GB ram.

As far as pricing, I'm pretty flexible but would like to stay reasonably low, maybe around $400-500?

What CPU do you recommend with that motherboard? A Core i3?

 

[PCTC2]

Another option could be the SuperMicro X9SCM-F, a Core i3-1200, and get 8 GB of DDR3 Unbuffered (aka Unregistered or "UDIMM") ECC RAM and a Silverstone TJ08-E case. It's a little larger, can hold 5 3.5" and 1 2.5" HDDs, and it's pretty nice. You still get out-of-band management and you can run VMware/whatever on it.

Other cases could be the Lian Li PC-V354B, or PC-A04B (both with 7 HDD bays), or the Fractal Design Define Mini, or the Silverstone PS07 (the cheaper version of the TJ08-E).

If the Core i3 is a little too anemic for you in the future, you can toss in a Xeon E3-1220 into it to get a quad-core with VT-x + VT-d. (The Core i3 doesn't have VT-d. VT-d is directed I/O virtualization. VT-x is the standard CPU virtualization.).

I personally run this setup. It used to run FreeNAS with 4x2TB HDD + OS drive + 64GB SSD Cache, but now it runs my at-home server with RedHat and it runs great. The cool thing is if you set up port-forwarding from your router to your server, if you're out on vacation and it crashes, you can reset it remotely.

 

[Chapbass]

Another option could be the SuperMicro X9SCM-F, a Core i3-1200, and get 8 GB of DDR3 Unbuffered (aka Unregistered or "UDIMM") ECC RAM and a Silverstone TJ08-E case. It's a little larger, can hold 5 3.5" and 1 2.5" HDDs, and it's pretty nice. You still get out-of-band management and you can run VMware/whatever on it.

Other cases could be the Lian Li PC-V354B, or PC-A04B (both with 7 HDD bays), or the Fractal Design Define Mini, or the Silverstone PS07 (the cheaper version of the TJ08-E).

If the Core i3 is a little too anemic for you in the future, you can toss in a Xeon E3-1220 into it to get a quad-core with VT-x + VT-d. (The Core i3 doesn't have VT-d. VT-d is directed I/O virtualization. VT-x is the standard CPU virtualization.).

I personally run this setup. It used to run FreeNAS with 4x2TB HDD + OS drive + 64GB SSD Cache, but now it runs my at-home server with RedHat and it runs great. The cool thing is if you set up port-forwarding from your router to your server, if you're out on vacation and it crashes, you can reset it remotely.

OP, if MicroATX is a suitable form factor for you and not too big, then I would totally agree with this. Even with just the i3-2100 you should have plenty of power for what you're doing.

 

[Talaii]

Intel has their own out-of-band management stuff (Intel AMT). If you do need more power, an intel DQ67EP (mini-ITX Q67 board), plus an i5 chip that supports AMT/VT-D (2400/2500/2600 and S/T variants work) should let you have all the bells and whistles. The only potential problem is that it won't support ECC ram.

The intel boards claim "only work with 65W processors" but if you read through the documentation it's a thermal limit Intel is worried about - in a cramped chassis, the stock cooler might not be enough to dissipate 95W worth of heat. The boards will certainly work with a normal i5/i7 chip, just make sure it doesn't overheat.

 

[scsi stud]

*bump*

I wanted to re-visit this thread - Almost 5-6 months has passed, and I am now seriously interested in taking the plunge, in the next week or so.

Now that some time has passed, are the recommendations still the same? Or is there new hardware/packages that are new and are better?

Again, I'm basically trying to get/build a small form-factor machine that I can install the following on:

1) Windows Server 2012 Essentials
2) VMware (so I can install Ubuntu)
3) Team Foundation Server
4) On Ubuntu: Apache, Hadoop, Solr, Lucene, etc. (one or more of these)
5) Use the server for file storage, pics/videos (so I want to get 2 large drives in mirror-RAID)


Therefore I don't think I need something way too fancy, but something that will last me a good while. I know some of you previously mentioned a Core-i3 (Sandy Bridge), but now that Ivy Bridge is out, would that be the recommendation? How about motherboard/case? Or maybe have everything in a pre-assembled package?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[Chapbass]

I'm a bit busy to write up something right now, but I think a low-mid ivy bridge i3 would be perfectly fine for you. I'd stick with the same case options and things.

One thing that has changed is the price of SSDs. Samsung 830 has gone down in price dramatically in the last few months, so if you need fast I/O (which it doesn't seem like it, but I'm just mentioning it), then you can grab a 256gb drive for about 170 from amazon.

 

[scsi stud]

I'm thinking about getting this case: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811119261

Apparently it takes full-size PSU's. Which PSU would you all recommend for what I'm trying to do?

 

[stevech]

IN WIN has some nice small form factor cases too.

I use a NAS for storage, and serving web pages, FTP, DLNA, etc.

I've built two mini-ITX boxes. Opinion: If you don't want to use a NAS, and instead run Win 2008 server (why???) then go mATX in a small case. Mini-ITX is a physical PITA and hard to cool.

 

[scsi stud]

After a bit of shopping around, this is what I've come up with:

Case: Cooler Master Mini-ITX (https://secure.newegg.com/WishList/...542547&RandomID=11989681002623920121025085749)

Motherboard: ASRock H77M-ITX (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157311)

PSU: Rosewill RG430-S12 430W ATX (Full size, but this case can fit full ATX PSU's).. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817182202

CPU: Core i3-3225 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819116774)

RAM: G.Skill 8GB DDR3-1600 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231314)

Hard Drive: WD Black 2TB 7200RPM Drive (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136792)

For what I'm trying to do, is this good? If not, what changes would you make and why?

Many thanks.

 

[PCTC2]

Well, to use the system as a file server, you'll have to stick with a Type 2 Hypervisor (VMware Workstation/Player, VirtualBox, or Hyper-V installed on top of Windows Server).

I would recommend (again):

Core i5-3470S
Intel DQ77KB Motherboard
2x8GB DDR3-1333 SO-DIMM
Lian Li PC-Q25B
400W FSP SFX PSU w/ ATX Bracket
Highpoint RocketRAID 2680SGL
SFF-8087 to 4x SATA Cable (needs 2)

Samsung 128GB SSD (OS)
5x 1TB HDD of your choice.

The RocketRAID is cheap. It's a fakeRAID controller (uses CPU for RAID parity calculations) but your CPU should be powerful enough for a home server + fakeRAID duties. You should do something like a 4-disk RAID5 + hot-spare.

Why did I pick a Core i5 over a Core i3? Because you need vPro (to use Intel AMT w/ KVM-over-IP). This CPU is the lowest that has vPro. The other (more expensive) option is a Xeon E3-1265LV2.

This server should be more than powerful enough for your needs. Install Windows Server 2012 Essentials and install VMware Player (or similar Type 2 Hypervisor) on top.

You could go cheaper if you go larger. As before, I said,

Core i3-3220, Supermicro X9SCL-F, 2x8GB Kingston DDR3 ECC Unregistered DIMM, Fractal Design Define Mini Case.