Server Build

[Linias]

My company was looking at an antsle and I managed to convince them it was a bad deal. I want to give an alternate suggestion - probably building our own because I didn't see any dell refurbs that really fit our needs.

What we are looking to do:
* install eucalyptus and other supporting systems to make a small personal AWS-like cloud
* I don't see us having more than 6-10 VM's running at one time
* However, they are beefy VM's - running windows, SQL, Sharepoint, etc.

It's okay if they are a little bit slower. The intent is to make a test bed for our development environment that is cheaper then provisioning AWS servers, but match AWS closely enough that we can develop to it.

I would like to come in cheaper on the hardware with room for upgrades (so maybe second processor port that's not being used off the bat - don't need a 16 core chip to start off).

What would you recommend for motherboard and CPU? Any other hardware is appreciated, but I can figure most of that out from the above.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I'd recommend a refurbished or used server - even if you buy it on eBay or something.

Something like this.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Power...40GHz-8-Cores-64GB-H710-2x-146GB/173266184874

No warranty to speak of, but it's cheap and you basically just have to add a little storage to fit your needs. (And if you already have a file server, great, because VMware lets you use NFS for datastores.)

The off-lease data center stuff is super-plentiful, and excellent from a CPU-and-RAM-per-dollar standpoint. If it's not production or revenue sensitive, then the slightly higher change of hardware failure is really only an inconvenience. If it breaks, you buy another one for less than the price of fixing it. If you need more VM capacity, you buy a second one for less than the price of a RAM upgrade. Spill a soda in the data center? Buy another one. Moon full? Buy another one.

The downside is that it's loud, hot, and rack-mounted.

Edit: if you want to build your own, reddit /r/homelab will have a lot of threads about ESX "white box" builds for VM hosting.

 

[Linias]

Hey thanks! Appreciate the advice!

 

[Genx87]

Ebay is a great place to pick up used gear.

 

[aigomorla]

how important are your servers?

how much budget is allocated to the machines, and then to the IT department responsible for maintenance on said machines?

Is there even a full time IT department that could do emergency repairs / maintance on said machines should they go down for whatever reason?


A Server is NOT a desktop machine.
When a Server goes down, the entire company is down until the server can be brought back up, unless you have redundancies.
A Used server is hammered hard, because that was what they were intended to do, and under most occasions are retired out when the IT department feels a potential risk in either downtime, or a downgrade in efficiency over newer machines has been achieved.

On that note, if this is just a machine which the business will be playing with, and you have redundant backups incase it goes down, or its designed to be a redundant backup, then sure, go with a used machine.

If its a mission critical machine, where if it goes down, the business will be offline, then absolutely no.
You cant justify enough reasons to you boss on why you purchased a used machine which was previously hammered, on such a important role, unless the boss was being super cheap, and told you to do that.

Nor would i take any responsibility in such a choice should something happen to said machine which will take the entire company offline until IT can fix it and bring it back up.

 

[Genx87]

The OP is creating a test bed. Not a mission critical machine.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I'd look at Supermicro. It's "enterprisy" without being ridiculously expensive. For the price of one Dell, IBM, HP etc server you can build two Supermicro servers of same or better specs and build better redundancy into the setup. Big companies like Facebook and Google actually use lot of consumer/custom gear. Their scaling allows for failures.

The reasons for going with the big names like IBM is not technical but political. It's so you have someone to blame if something goes wrong since there will be SLAs etc. So you need to decide if that is actually worth it or not based on the company's attitude towards IT. If they don't completely flip out over issues and give you your time and space to fix problems then go the more DIY approach but if a single blip on the network can cost your job then it's best to go with the companies that have SLAs etc so you can put it on them and not you.

Whatever you go with just make sure management knows the pros and cons.