Hello guys, I need a "small" server, to have under my bed, so it has to be quiet and still cheap.. i just copied this from the build advice thread: Budget: my company is paying, so cheap as possible.. Main uses of intended build: running some virtual machines ( small business server 2008, a windows 7 client, a windows server 2008 with exchange, sql but not with that much data it's only a test environment ) all running on ESXi Parts required: Dual NIC's, mabye a small SSD for ESXi and a tb or 2 for the servers ( mabye 2 1 tb's in raid 0 ) mabye an i3 or xeox 1200 series Previous build information (list details of parts): none! Monitor resolution: would be like 1280 x 1024 Storage requirements: Storage for VM's 1 or 2 Tb. will you be overclocking: no Any motherboard requirements (no. of USB, Xfire/SLI, fan headers): Extra information about desired system: Silent is a important factor..
How many VM's at a time? Here's some info anyway You're looking at 16GB RAM minimum to make it worthwhile. ESXi can boot off a USB stick fine so save the money you were going to spend on the SSD. ESXi will only support RAID on proper RAID cards so ignore onboard RAID solutions, a modified Dell Perc 5i will do it for little money. You'll need either Intel or Broadcom NIC's for the networking as others aren't supported. Monitor resolution doesn't m,atter as you can't see anything on the ESXi server anyway (excelt setting the IP via a basic console), it's all done from another machine using the VMWare Client.
If you want to run them all then I'd say you'd be looking at 32GB of RAM. In a VM environment you almost always run out of RAM before CPU. Any preference to the size of case?
Well i would start with 16GB of ram ( thats the cheapest ) for the start.. and then mabye expand to 32GB.. I've been looking at the Fractal design 3000 case, but the size dosen't really matter.
How much network load will the server have put on it? Multiple NICs are not necessary unless strict hardware-level partitioning or high network throughput is required. A single NIC can be set to 'bridged mode', whereby each VM gets its own IP address on the network and acts as a separate network 'entity'. The other reason for multiple NICs is to physically separate the inner and outer networks. Get as much RAM as you can afford. You can get away with giving the Win7 client 4GB of RAM, but server applications (I'm looking at you, MySQL) require a LOT of memory. As far as HDD storage is concerned - this will be the expensive part due to the inflated HDD prices. If you want a degree of redundancy in terms of your data, you need to be looking at RAID 1 or 5. RAID 1 will give faster read speeds (to fill up that nice Gigabit connection I'm sure you have) but write speeds are still low and the capacity is in total just one of the disks. RAID 5 needs 3 disks minimum, but only one disk's capacity is 'lost' with the parity data. RAID 5 also allows blisteringly fast read and write speeds (along the lines of 300MB/s write and 1TB/s read). RAID 1 gives you redundancy of n - 1. This means that every disk but one can fail and you can retrieve your data. RAID 5 gives you redundancy of 1. One disk can fail, but any other disks fail and you are looking at lost data. If you need more than 1 redundant disk, then RAID 6 is basically the same but with 2 sets of parity data - aka redundancy of 2. Just remember that RAID is no alternative for a backup! RAID may prevent data loss due to hardware failure, but in case of massive damage (usually fire) the entire RAID array may be lost. Also, backups let data recovery when an employee slips up (accidentally overwriting files etc.).
