Can you helpme to choose new servers?

[b3rkl3y]

Hello,

My company just gave me budget to buy some new servers, and now I'm trying to realize what exactly I should buy.

My plan is to buy:

Servers:
3x or 4x PowerEdge 2970

2x Six Core AMD OpteronTM 2427,2.2GHz, 6MB , HT-3
Cache, HT-3
Memory:
16GB (4x4GB), 800MHz, Dual Ranked

Storage:
2x Dell Equallogic (PS4000E or PS4000X)
(other option would be to buy 2 more servers and put 6 disks on each and install an software appliance eg: openfiler or open-e)

My main objective is to migrate most of my old servers to this new scenario. I have around 20 servers and most of them aren't using any type of virtualization. Most of my old servers are proliants with 32bit cpus 2GB RAM or less"
I have only 3 or 4 servers that are CPU/Disk intensive and if things gets ugly I can let some of those servers outside the new servers.



My questions are:
1) Should I stick with Six core cpus or should I go to Quad core?
2) the idea of having 3 or 4 servers, is to have one "spare" server in case of hardware failure of one server i can move the Virtual machines to the spare.
3) Talking about the storage, am I overshooting? Should I consider to not use an storage for only 3 or 4 servers? I can live without something like vmotion, But all my data stored on the same place seens good and would allow me to have a better virtual enviroment. (2 storages for failover)
4) I can see that proxmox now support iSCSI for KVM guests, is there any plans for OpenVZ guests?
5) Any other suggestions?

Thanks!

edit: Not sure if I did posted this on the correct section of the forum.

 

[oscar13]

Yes, I used to be Dell-only until I tried an HP server. Wow!.

Installed proxmox 1.4 on a couple of HP DL380's, and will never look back.

I purchased 2 DL380 with dual quad-core processors, 16GB ram, and (8) 2.5" hot-swap 10k SAS drives. The first two drives setup as raid-1 for the Proxmox O/S, the remaining 6 as raid 1+0, used for my Windows VMs.

Those 6 drives are setup on the new DRBD (http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/DRBD) network-based raid-1 filesystem. This setup completely eliminates the need to purchase separate Dell-Equallogic boxes for SANS storage. Check out the above link and check out http://www.linbit.com - the guys behind DRBD.

Sounds as if your budget may allow you to purchase higher HP boxes such as the 16-drive models.

Hope that helps.

-J

 

[joec22]

oscar13, can you tell me what controller you use on the dl380? and is that g5 or g6?

thanks
joe

 

[oscar13]

oscar13, can you tell me what controller you use on the dl380? and is that g5 or g6?

thanks
joe

I'm using the DL380 G5, Dual Quad, 2x72GB SAS (Raid 1) fo Proxmox OS, 6x300GB SAS (Raid 10) for DRBD VMs.

Smart array P400i Raid controller.

You won't go wrong with either, the G6 is sweet.

-obj

 

[joec22]

Thanks for the quick response. Your setup is almost exactly what I'm looking to try. I'm glad to hear the HP controllers work. My problem is I'm trying to get 2TB usable for each end of the DRBD, but the cost increases too much for 10K drives. Did you consider this an expensive solution?

 

[oscar13]

Thanks for the quick response. Your setup is almost exactly what I'm looking to try. I'm glad to hear the HP controllers work. My problem is I'm trying to get 2TB usable for each end of the DRBD, but the cost increases too much for 10K drives. Did you consider this an expensive solution?

This solution was a fraction of the cost of purchasing an external Dell-Equallogic SANS (2 of them) to complete an alternative solution.

DRBD enables you to eliminate that need, so why not put some of those $$ saved, into the server.

You may not need 10k SAS drives in your setup, we did for our database usage.

-obj

 

[joec22]

We actually use lefthand SAN, and EQ is similarly priced, so we know how expensive that can be. We will have mostly file server use in this location, but we could end up moving other systems onto the platform if successful. That would include exchange, SQL, vms, etc.

For us, it comes down to:

many 7200 SATA drives in order to save cost
vs
fewer, faster 10K SAS drives for production, "enterprise" use