Show us your servers / NAS boxes!

[reverend]

Have you given 2012R2 a go yet? It's head and shoulders above all the previous versions of hyper-v and the feature set comparison shows it's now surpassing VMWare in certain areas (admittedly it's a TechNet post so prob biased to Hyper-V): http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithmaye...x#.UyjK_7tF3IU

Yeah mate I got around to upgrading the lab at home to 2012R2, plus just doing a XenDesktop project at work with 2012R2 as we speak. To be honest I've gone through that list and it's just a marketing chaff - the 2012R2 platform is definitely better than 2008 was, whether they've got rid of the BSODs that plague the 2008R2 Hyper-V hosts that Microsoft themselves cannot solve in our environment remains to be seen!

Did you watch that 2 day 2012 R2 Hyper-V thing that Symon Perriman did? It was quite funny watching them gush and showing features of 2012R2 but when asked VMware questions they genuinely had no idea on some of the basics - you'd really expect evangelists to at least know the basics of competing products.

We see random issues with VMM too in that it just ignores certain power off commands from XenDesktop - I've got to admit System Center as a whole is a black art to me so really need to get my head around it all - historically we've always been a VMware shop with MS guests but the new place we bought wants to look at moving to Hyper-V so I need to spend some proper time with it and XenServer to cover more bases off.

Liking Deja's case there - that's very nice!

[Rick Sanchez]

This looks nice.





Small Form Factor NAS chassis which can support 12 total drives with 8 hot-swappable 3.5” or 2.5” SAS/SATA and 4 fixed 2.5” drives.

[Tim.Lad]

Link ?

[vgopal]

Not a pic of my actual server but...
This case


With 3x of these


Space for 15 HDDS

Server running vmware and unraid on that.

[reverend]

That's a lot of porn

[Mr.James]

Yeah mate I got around to upgrading the lab at home to 2012R2, plus just doing a XenDesktop project at work with 2012R2 as we speak. To be honest I've gone through that list and it's just a marketing chaff - the 2012R2 platform is definitely better than 2008 was, whether they've got rid of the BSODs that plague the 2008R2 Hyper-V hosts that Microsoft themselves cannot solve in our environment remains to be seen!

Did you watch that 2 day 2012 R2 Hyper-V thing that Symon Perriman did? It was quite funny watching them gush and showing features of 2012R2 but when asked VMware questions they genuinely had no idea on some of the basics - you'd really expect evangelists to at least know the basics of competing products.

We see random issues with VMM too in that it just ignores certain power off commands from XenDesktop - I've got to admit System Center as a whole is a black art to me so really need to get my head around it all - historically we've always been a VMware shop with MS guests but the new place we bought wants to look at moving to Hyper-V so I need to spend some proper time with it and XenServer to cover more bases off.

When we were on 2008R2 we used to get more VM BSODs than we cared for, at least one a week. Found that they were down to the storage though. I upgraded the firmware of our LeftHand SANs from 9 to 10 and most of them went away. After moving to 2012R2 we've had literally none. Uptime on the primary node of the cluster is currently 115 days... It houses 41 VMs and ticks over at about 30% utilization so it's not as if it's idled it's way there.

The stuff that really impressed me was the live migration. On 2k8R2 it was one at a time, on 2012R2 you can set how many to move in one go. I've got it set to 5 at the minute (I have 4x 1GB NICs dedicated to LM) and it drains the server in no time at all. On the 2008R2 box, my migration script used to take 40-50 minutes to move all the VMs from node A to node B. On 2012R2 it's down to 5! That's pretty good to say the VMs are using 100GB of RAM!

I installed SCVMMR2 about a month after the upgrade. It's a pretty decent product but I don't use it for much more than deploying VMs... It freaked me out after about 2 weeks of being installed. It just decided one weekend that half my VMs would be better off on the backup node of the cluster and moved them all over to optimise the load. Having half my VMs 'missing' on Monday morning was the last thing I wanted! lol

[danbarber]

Wow, some crazy setups here! Mine seems tame in comparison.

I currently run an HP Micro Server N40L with 4x2TB drives. I'm running FreeBSD 9 with ZFS (for RAIDz, checksumming and compression on the filesystem). My router is a Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH running OpenWRT with an Airport Express for wifi. The setup works pretty well for streaming media to my Boxee Box and Sonos system.

[keyser666]

I've just been offered:

Supermicro X9SCM-F and i3 3220 CPU brand new [Boxed] for £175 inc VAT and P&P.

Should I grab it? No Vt-d though but I could always sell the i3 for something with Vt-d. Is the board better than the AsRock E3C226D2I? Which is £155 through Amazon.

Going to be using ESXi or Hyper-V. Most likely Hyper-V as I'm assuming it is a lot easier.

Uses: The same as the first post

Why the need for 12 disks?

[Rick Sanchez]

I have 27 disks lol. I'm trying to downsize but it have room to expand!

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[Rick Sanchez]

6TB HDD are out

http://www.amazon.co.uk/HGST-HUS7260...+TB+hard+drive

[beerman]

6TB HDD are out

http://www.amazon.co.uk/HGST-HUS7260...+TB+hard+drive

They are out but no where near the price range most of us would be comfortable to pay.

£664 for a HDD, feck off.

[fanni]

They are out but no where near the price range most of us would be comfortable to pay.

£664 for a HDD, feck off.

Especially when in about 3 months they'll be £99.99

[Mobileman]

Yep and the 10tb will be £600 it's a constant movement I remember selling my first dx2-66 desktop for £1800 and signal speed cd recorder for £1k , you just have to buy the space or speed as and when required IMO no point in hanging on

[Rick Sanchez]

Not saying I would buy one at that price. These are BlackBlaze use

[Over Carl]

Yep and the 10tb will be £600 it's a constant movement I remember selling my first dx2-66 desktop for £1800 and signal speed cd recorder for £1k , you just have to buy the space or speed as and when required IMO no point in hanging on

So true - if you look at the computer/phone/gadget world, you can always delay your purchase because of the new stuff just about to come out but then you will never actually get one.

Sometimes you have to just say fuck it, I want/need it now, so I'm getting it now.

[Rick Sanchez]

It would be a bastard if you lost 10tb of data! You'd have to raid

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[Rick Sanchez]

Hi guys,

I have been running a small UnRAID setup for a couple of years to hold everything. But I need to separate the data over two boxes now as I cannot afford to loose some of it!


So, here is my my current setup:
12Tb File Server:
Case: Fractal Design Array R2,
CPU & Motherboard: Intel D510MO / D510 Intel MN10,
RAM: 4Gb DDR2 800Mhz.

Parity Drive: 2TB
Data Drives: 6x 2TB
Cache Drive: 1x 500GB 2.5"

I want to swap all of my hard drives for a dozen for 4 or 5TB WD Red drives due to the power consumption being tiny and it will enable me to downsize all of my IT equipment massively, including my tower.

------------------------------------------------------------

I love my current setup due to it being a extremely low powered system and virtual silent! I am upgrading my current setup, with the view of not needing to upgrade for at least 5 or 6 years, hopefully. The plan is to run a couple of virtual machines on my new box, by using either Hyper-V or UnRAID 6/ESXi etc to combine as many systems as possible into one unit. My major bugbear is power hungry systems, especially when electric is not cheap in the UK. So I want the build to draw as little power as possible!

The primary uses of the new server will be:

• Computer backups using rsync or similar
• Virtual machines (Defiantly one that I can run Windows while at university as the campus is all Macs)
• - VM: Home security; IP Cameras
• VM: Home Automation, maybe?

• Film, TV, Music etc Storage
• XBMC/Plex server, VM maybe?

I also want to run the following addons to source content for XBMC/Plex, backups etc:

• SABnzbd
• Couchpotato
• Sickbeard
• LazyLibrarian
• Mylar
• Headphones
• Plex Media Server
• XBMC Server

Maybe a few other things.

I am trying to spec my new home server for serving media to my flat [2x TV's and 1x PC] and potentially 5x offsite Plex streams.

------------------------------------------------------------
New Parts Ordered 16/06/2014
------------------------------------------------------------

The new build
Case: Silverstone DS380 - £107.04
CPU: Intel Xeon E3 1230 v3 - £181.86
MOBO: ASRock E3C226D2I LGA 1150 Mini-ITX [IPMI] - £130.99
RAM: 16GB Kingston 8GB ECC KVR16E11/8 - £119.56
PSU: 450W Silverstone SST-ST45SF-G - £76.14
UPS: APC BR900GI 540 Watts /900 VA - £139.98

Total Price (So Far): £755.57 - Unknown Cash back
------------------------------------------------------------

When all of the parts arrived and I start assembly I will take some photos

Any server name suggestions??

[beerman]

Any server name suggestions??

TheBeast


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[Mr.James]

I have Sab/SB/CP/HP running on a Debian Linux VM. It also runs VsFTPd for FTP services. Fail2Ban to ban incorrect logins (brute force password hackers). Transmission for BitTorrent. Dropbox for two separate account (syncing mine and Mrs accounts). Samba for mapping Windows shares. NFS Server for mounting folders to different VMs which need access. All that uses about 1.8GB RAM and houses all my media (6TB).

I've also got a Debian Linx VM which does all my streaming, so I have Subsonic on there for streaming music which gives you a nice website with an embedded flash player for streaming stuff on the web (also does videos). Also installed on this is AirVideoServer for streaming to all my iDevices. This eats 800MB RAM

I've just set up a Plex VM as I'm eyeing up a Samsung Smart TV which has a Plex streaming app available on their app store. This uses about 350MB RAM.

In addition to that I run a Debian VM which is a MusicBrainz mirror. This speeds up HeadPhones searches considerably and could be worth looking into... Another 768MB RAM for that.

I've another Debian VM which runs OwnCloud. This lets me sync the important docs on my laptops to the NAS, the same as how Dropbox works. I have the client installed on my work PC which syncs a few folders to work. I've also set up my parents PCs to sync with it over the net. 600MB RAM

I also index newsgroups with Newznab. This eats up 2GB.

This runs on an i3-2120T (2-core, 4 threads) with 8GB RAM with Windows Hyper-V server as the main OS. All the VMs (command line only to reduce footprints) and the OS live on one 500GB drive which is around half full. I have no transcoding issues or slowdown (or not that I've noticed anyway!)

Based on this, I'd say you've got plenty of grunt left in that spec to last 5-6 years. My system's half of what yours is and does it all no problem.

As for names I always go with themes. I names the servers at work after Transformers. So the primary domain controller is called OptimusPrime, backup domain controller is Megatron. Backup server is called Ratchet (the medic). Comms server is Soundwave. Active/Passive cluster boxes are Ironhide/Shockwave respectively... The list goes on. We have about 40 Transformers on our network lol

[Rick Sanchez]

Thanks for your input. Your server names are pretty cool, I don't think I'll need 40 named though.. .

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