newbie - rackmountable server advice

[junglism]

Hi All,

 

cant believe i just found out about this product!

 

Ok, briefly, i'm a network admin for a small firm in the UK. I'm after some cheap storage to build a virtual test environment with vmware workstation/esx

 

Now the newbie bit is that i've never built a pc from scratch before.. and the idea of spending lots of company money and not getting it working scares me a little...  so i'm wondering if i'm better off buying prebuilt, or putting it together myself?....

 

I'm after 6TB of storage, expandable if possible, and rackmounting is necessary. max budget is about us$2600.

 

Have searched the forum but cant find much about rackmounted stuff - thought i'd have a lot higher probability of success if i purchased a setup someone selse had already built.

 

I've got about 1yrs experience mucking around with ubuntu server so the software side should be manageable.

 

appreciate any help

 

[hypyke]

Have searched the forum but cant find much about rackmounted stuff

 

There is a ton of info on the Norco cases.  Search for that.

[Kaygee]

The norco cases are available from xcase.co.uk including the 20 bay.

 

20 bay £299.00 + VAT plus delivery or the X-Case RM 208 V2, Mini SAS, 8 Hotswap caddy. No Psu. for £139.00.

 

If you are using unRAID as a windows file server or to backup VMWare images it would be perfect. VMWare workstation unRAID is again perfect.

For VMWare ESX storage you need a NFS server or preferably iSCSI capable NAS.

 

If you are happy to replace a PSU, a HDD and a NIC in an existing PC you can build a new PC. It is fairly straight forward. 

 

With rackmount installs there are three basic types and the two cases above both support vertical cards - 8 bay one support half height cards (any add-on cards will need to be half height cards). Think NIC/SATA or Video cards (if you go for this board get an integrated video board 1/2 height video card are few and far between).

 

The 20 bay Norco takes vertical cards also, but full height cards means virtually any card will be OK.

 

The third type of case is usually 1U or 2U only where addon cards are mounted horizontally. This makes motherboard choice much more challenging. Stay away from this type of case for now at least.   

 

I'd build a cheap test bed server first to see if unraid meets your requirements. xcase do a cheap jeantech case with 8 5.25 bays for £25. Find a decent motherboard (hardware compatibility pages, min 6 sata ports), three big fast SATA drives and a decent PSU.

 

If your happy with unRaid you can re-use all of this stuff except the case (unless you stick on a shelf in the rack! dont laugh seen plenty of those in my time) in your real unRAID server. Explain to your boss you have found a very cost effective potential solution but you need to purchase a testbed server for an initial evaluation. You need £500 budget approval for this and most of this hardware can be re-purposed into the final project as the hardware platform will be be common between the intial testbed and the final solution.

 

 

[junglism]

wow thanks for the excellent info kaygee!!

i'll do exactly as you said. kudos

[boof]

wow thanks for the excellent info kaygee!!

i'll do exactly as you said. kudos

 

In the interests of helping you with your problem - have you looked at openfiler as an alternative?

 

This will export via iscsi for vmware and in my opinion would give you much better IOPS performance for virtual machines than unraid.

 

unraid will work fine, and performance may not be important depending on the number of machines and the fact you're looking for a test environment only. However if you're planning on running a number of machines or want good i/o (particularly writes) for the vm's then I would consider openfiler.

 

 

[Kaygee]

Good advice, I didn't like to mention another products name on unRAIDs forums, if you're planning on using ESX openfiler would my product of choice with a supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 (scan.co.uk) £85ish. 

[Zithras]

If  you do decide on unRAID, just as a comparison, not including hard drive costs, I set up a 20-drive non-rackmount unRAID server (x2) for about $1000 each.

 

Figure in about 5x 1.5 TB drives for $500-600, and you're still well underbudget.

 

The most expensive part of the build were the 5-in-3 SATA hard drive cages.

 

Zithras

 

(edit: I've heard the Norco cases have major airflow issues - make sure and research the fixes for that if you go that route)

[PhatalOne]

The newer Norco cases don't have extremely terrible airflow... the problem with them is that they are terribly loud for the airflow that is delivered.  Unless you have a dedicated server room/closet, it means having an extremely noisy piece of equipment somewhere in a living area.  I'm running a 4220 with 12 drives and have replaced all of the fans to quiet it down significantly and I have no issues.  The major thing I changed was adding only 5400/5900rpm LP drives instead of 7200rpm drives.  I have 6 7200rpm drives and 6 LP drives and the difference in operating temps between the two is easily 10c.  If I could get the existing 7200's out I would.