Hardware recommendations/recipes

[twocell]

I'm putting together hardware for my production cluster. I've been looking at a Supermicro Twin^2 which is a barebones server that puts four servers in one 2U case sharing one redundant PS. It seems good, except for the Intel ICH10R fakeraid, which I doubt is going to run well under Proxmox. I'd much prefer to use Linux software raid, but I don't want to run into a tremendous hassle every time I upgrade Proxmox.

It also brings up the question: should I run 4 different identical servers with raid on each, or should I have a dedicated storage/NAS machine?

If anyone has any successful hardware recipes please share!

 

[udo]

I'm putting together hardware for my production cluster. I've been looking at a Supermicro Twin^2 which is a barebones server that puts four servers in one 2U case sharing one redundant PS. It seems good, except for the Intel ICH10R fakeraid, which I doubt is going to run well under Proxmox. I'd much prefer to use Linux software raid, but I don't want to run into a tremendous hassle every time I upgrade Proxmox.

It also brings up the question: should I run 4 different identical servers with raid on each, or should I have a dedicated storage/NAS machine?

If anyone has any successful hardware recipes please share!

Hi,
depends on your usage - with OpenVZ you need local storage - a fast raidcontroller make sense.
With kvm you will be best with fast external storage to use live migration - perhaps you don't need a raid controller (if your configs are backed up).
I startet with proxmox on a sun blade - with an ugly slow lsi onboard raid controller ( a shame for sun and lsi...). With external storage (Fibre Channel) it work's but not with real fun.
Now i have a fast raid controller and also FC-Storage and i'm happy with this (need only better drbd-performance).

Udo

 

[twocell]

I'm not reselling virtual machines, so the the machines need to support just a few guests for one organization; a couple of legacy Windows 2003 KVM's and some Linux guests, probably KVM as well since I'm not sure I need the density of OpenVZ (and I want to run the latest Ubuntu LTS). The applications are web servers, email servers, DNS servers and database servers.

I'm thinking about building a Openfiler storage server for storage. I'm wondering how iSCSI will perform on a gigabit lan ...