Choosing hardware for Small Office Server

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fagiano

Member
Feb 5, 2011
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Singapore
Hi, I have to setup the "IT infrastructure" for a small company(my company) we are moving to a temporary office and I was thinking of consolidating all in one server.
I have to select the hardware to run the core services for our team(~10 workstations) and I'm not sure how much horsepower I actually need. It has been a long time since I've done admin stuff.
I run my personal stuff on SmartOS/OmniOS so I'd like to use a SmartOS server.

This are the VM/zones I plan to setup:

  • AD Domain Controller:
    • either SmartOS zone samba4(to be tested) or KVM + Windows Server (~10 users)
  • File Server:
    • SmartOS zone with samba as a company file share(light usage, just to store standard company SW installations and such)
  • DB server:
    • SmartOS zone (light load 1 or 2 concurrent users)
  • Version control server (SVN):
    • SmartOS zone (light load 1 or 2 concurrent users)
  • Dev test VM:
    • KVM zone with Windows server(only used for occasional testing)

Currently I'm taking in consideration this HW:

A) Avoton C2750 based board with 32GB of RAM
B) E3-1230 quad core with 32GB of RAM
C) Xeon D-1540 based board with 32GB of RAM
D) Do I need more beef?

NOTE: All configs with 4x 1Gb NICs and 4 HDD in 3 way mirror on ZFS + 1 hot spare

What do you think is a reasonable HW choice? Price is not really a major concern if it is around 2000$ (chassis and HDDs excluded) but less is obviously better as it is somewhat temporary. When we move to a more definitive office next year I'll build a more future proof setup.

thank you for your time
ciao
Alberto
 

cesmith9999

Well-Known Member
Mar 26, 2013
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The question that I ask is: how long do you plan to do the next server upgrade? 1 year? I try to get as much life out of my hardware as possible. and servers are usually last in line to get upgraded in a small business.

If you are planning on upgrading in 1 year anyway. I would go with option A. however, I would recommend option C and get a 10 GB switch as this elongates the life of the server and allows for its upgrades to be "just add RAM".

with option A and a new server in a year. you can relegate the old server to dev duties.

Chris
 

fagiano

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Feb 5, 2011
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Singapore
Probably the server will have less than a year lifetime with this config. We will move in our definitive office by the end of year; there I can setup a proper server rack and demote this server as a test platform or NAS.

thank you
Alberto
 

CreoleLakerFan

Active Member
Oct 29, 2013
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The C2750 and E3 platforms are RAM constrained. The practical limit for both is 32GB, although there is a single sourced (and expensive!) 64Gb option for the C2x50.

The Xeon 1500 can take up to 128GB and has 10GbE options. That would be my choice.
 

Jeggs101

Well-Known Member
Dec 29, 2010
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So I'd get either the C2750 or the Xeon D. With the C2750 you're stuck with max 32GB but in a year you'll have a low power server to run basic services. With the Xeon D you'll be able to upgrade RAM and have the CPU power to do something more useful.
 

fagiano

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Feb 5, 2011
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I also think the Xeon D is a great platform, my only concern is that, being quite recent, might have some driver quirk. Lack of Vt-d is not an issue. Anyway my biggest issue was that I wasn't sure the C2750 would be fast enough for the task. It seems to me that you guys think it is. am I right?
 
Are you married to Subversion? It just seems like an odd choice for a new environment in 2015.

What sort of database are you going to be running? Be aware that RDBMS's will almost always execute synchronous writes, which ZFS will dutifully honor (unlike a lot of other Linux/UNIX filesystems) and performance may appear to be slow. At least budget for some SSD capacity for ZFS log (and preferably cache, as well).

If I were doing all of this today, I think I'd try to bite the bullet up front and get two servers with which to properly launch SmartDatacenter. That way you can add new servers to your environment more easily than running SmartOS by itself.

Also be aware that you will want to use a SAS HBA, not a RAID controller, if you're using SmartOS or any other illumos-derived OS.
 

fagiano

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Feb 5, 2011
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Singapore
We use subversion for binary assets. we are videogames developer and we have Gbs of large files (textures, 3d models, sounds etc...), git is not really suitable for that. For source code we use mercurial.

We are running Postgres, we use it as backend storage for out content creation tools and build integration, the load is very atypical. Mostly reads and big (1 or 2 minutes) write transactions once in a while(2 or 3 times a day). Currently we have it running on a old 2nd generation atom and there are no perf problems.

Yep, I thought of SDC, It seemed excessive at the moment. I have another server for running Backups and such, maybe I should install it there.

Alberto
 
If you're already on SmartOS and liking it, you might find an object store to be better suited for your blobs, or perhaps an artifact repository. A couple of places to being looking:
  1. Manta - better store for individual objects (like your own private AWS S3)
  2. Artifactory - better suited I think to archiving whole packages of software or libraries instead of individual objects.
Without having the benefit of your experience in your environment, I can't do more than suggest a casual look to see if either of these might help you to push the ball forward.
 

fagiano

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Feb 5, 2011
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Yep, I took a look at Manta, it seems very good for log massaging/dataminig kind of work. However we have relational integrity between our binaries(model->material->texture kind of dependencies) user permissions stuff, approval levels and we need ACID transactions. Artifactory is new to me, seems interesting, I have to give it a look.

Anyway you seem to know about illumos. do you by any chance know if SmartOS runs happily on Xeon-D?(Supermicro X10SDV-F in particular) I read some scary posts about hanging on boot and dying NICs, I'm not sure if there have been any progress.

Alberto
 
I do run illumos in my homelab on a couple of machines... It's pretty happy to run on a wide variety of processors, ranging from Intel Atom to AMD Athlon X2 & Duron... and more happily on Intel Xeons of various flavors (not sure about Xeon-D). It can be more particular about less open ethernet chipsets (Intel usually being preferable to Broadcom, for example). And of course with any zfs-based OS, it's better to have a SAS HBA than a RAID controller of any type (with LSI being given props as a very compatible brand). On known compatible hardware, it's been exceptionally stable.

I run SmartOS and OmniOS in the homelab, but that's about to become just OmniOS, at least for the time being. If I manage to somehow get more hardware, I'm very keen to check out SDC.
 

cperalt1

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Feb 23, 2015
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Besides SDC there is Project FIFO for having a gui frontend to SmartOS. Manta itself is open source as well so you can treat it like an S3 repo. Another option is LeoFS which is what Project FIFO prefers (dataset available at datasets.at). Another option for managing things is you can run SmartOS Coal which is a vmware image of SDC available on the SDC git repo.
 
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fagiano

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Feb 5, 2011
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I looked at project FIFO briefly but the naming of the various components are so hard to associate that it made my brain hurt :) and I moved on.
Dunno, I'm quite ok with ssh+vmadm for just a couple of servers. I can always migrate later if the thing gets bigger.
If I can find evidence that SmartOS runs on the X10SDV-F I'd go pick it up tomorrow morning...mmh
 

cperalt1

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Feb 23, 2015
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While Project FiFo can be used to manage one node, it is meant to be a Highly Available platform for managing SmartOS. It is written in Erlang hence all the different components (Chunter, Wiggle, Sniffle, etc, etc). The resource I used to get up and running was Mark Slatem's Blog who works on Project FiFo (SmartOS GUI - Project FiFo 0.6.0 - Demo and of course the documentation. There is also a walk-through on how to get the leofs dataset running as a FiFo zone. Currently I am using it to manage 3 Nodes.
 

cperalt1

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Feb 23, 2015
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At the time SDC was not open source so only option was FiFo. My Nodes are old Core2Duo Dell Desktops that were supposed to be scrapped at my office so I re purposed them. FiFo utilizes less resources as SDC likes to have a whole server for itself FiFo can just utilize one zone at around 1.5GB of Ram. SDC, however, will give you the docker endpoints as this is new work that was done with the lx-branded zones over the last year. I will be trying out SDC if time permits in the next few months after I "retire" a few Sandy Bridge i5's.
 

cperalt1

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Feb 23, 2015
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I looked at project FIFO briefly but the naming of the various components are so hard to associate that it made my brain hurt :) and I moved on.
Dunno, I'm quite ok with ssh+vmadm for just a couple of servers. I can always migrate later if the thing gets bigger.
If I can find evidence that SmartOS runs on the X10SDV-F I'd go pick it up tomorrow morning...mmh
I just posed this question over on the SmartOS IRC channel and had one of the Joyent Engineers respond so hopefully this means support will be there when supply isn't as constrained as today.

[13:34] <rmustacc> We don't yet have support for the new 10 GbE parts, but we're working on it.
[13:34] <rmustacc> And likely would have a platform you could test for the 10 GbE parts soon.
More Updates from SmartOS Land

[16:30] <modernpacifist> cperalt1: FYI - I've got a Supermicro Xeon-D board that initially had it's share of issues with SmartOS which I believe was pegged to buggy BIOS
[16:31] <modernpacifist> i.e. we got a second box that had a newer BIOS (the first official release) that worked fine
[16:31] <modernpacifist> But I haven't been able to upgrade the first box to confirm that it fixes it
[16:34] <Quadrant> what good is it without 10GbE D:
[16:37] <rmustacc> Well, you still have 1 GbE.
[16:37] <rmustacc> And if you have one of them and need the 10 GbE stat, well, then I can prioritize a bit more getting test bits out to folks.
[16:44] <ptr2ptr> modernpacifist: which board?
[16:45] <modernpacifist> X10SDV-TLN4F
[16:45] <modernpacifist> ptr2ptr: X10SDV-TLN4F
[16:48] <ptr2ptr> modernpacifist: I should sell my old CPU for that
[16:49] <modernpacifist> As rmustacc mentions, the 10GbE is currently inoperable but the 2 x 1GbE work fine
 
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fagiano

Member
Feb 5, 2011
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Singapore
thank you cperalt1. That's a good news especially because at the moment I really don't care about the 10Gb NICs.
I didn't know there was an IRC channel for SmartOS, I gotta check it out.
Anyway, I'm discussing with a colleague about another option that would consist in a dual E5-2620 v2(it not much more expensive than the Xeon-D due to the crazy DDR4 prices here in Singapore). I still would prefer the Xeon-D.

Alberto