pat-e

I'm not aware of any special cases or rules in US or Canada.
... but in EU (especially in Germany) when you are a so-called "Start-Up" and you need cheap hardware to beginn with, then using used hardware is OK for the first few years till your company has grown to a point where you can afford better and new hardware including all possible support contracts.
 
I've helped some few start-ups with used hardware (they bought them in first place and later asked me to help them setup their on-site AD). The made it split: Some system were in the cloud (AWS) and some system were on used hardware in the local office. Later the company grew bigger and after 3 years, they replaced all used hardware with brand new Cisco UCS Servers...
 
I think it depends on the situation.

Well, if you can, always look into the real enterprise grade server side: What NIC are they (enterprise) use there?
You'll never find Realtek ethernet devices on real servers. Most times they use Intel or Broadcomm NICs.
 
Reliability and performance sometimes differ. The stuff in servers is mainly build for reliability rather than just speed. The speed comes after the reliabilty.

I know about UPN change, but sometimes when you have an old environment running all sorts of servers (some are Windows 2012 R2, some are still Windows 2003 with very old legacy apps), then multiple UPN are not supported by some specialized applications.
 
The thing with the selection of AD-name: Consider possible forecasts, what does your business want, what does your "it security" say about possible naming, etc.
 
Sometimes the IT-department is not the deciding part but only the "team who implements the wishes of the business".
 
And generally: It is always better to work as IT-Department together with your business (or other non-technical departments).

I know about UPN change, but sometimes when you have an old environment running all sorts of servers (some are Windows 2012 R2, some are still Windows 2003 with very old legacy apps), then multiple UPN are not supported by some specialized applications.
 
The thing with the selection of AD-name: Consider possible forecasts, what does your business want, what does your "it security" say about possible naming, etc.
 
Sometimes the IT-department is not the deciding part but only the "team who implements the wishes of the business".
 
And generally: It is always better to work as IT-Department together with your business (or other non-technical departments).

The problem I see is the DAS (Direct Attached Storage). It would be much better if the storage would be FC so you can share the storage with 2 servers and create a Windows Cluster for File Services.
 
For Hyper-V: If you would use shared storage, then you could use Hyper-V HA and do a Live-Migration or in case of Hardware server loss, a storage motion.
 
With a DAS the best you could do is attach that storage to a smaller reliable machine, put some linux or bsd on it (like FreeNAS) and present the storage as iSCSI to both Hardware servers. With that you got the shared storage and you can use Cluster services for File-Clustering and VM-clustering.
 
The question is: do you want HA (High Availability) or just a simple "one machine is broken, replace it and restore the OS and software installed on that machine".
 
For HA, DAS is not the best idea as storage. But because you have it, you need a very reliable hardware box that can present the storage as iSCSI or FC to your Dell servers.

Just a note on PPTP VPNs, they're not really secure. The MS-CHAPv2 protocol that they very frequently use for authentication is no longer secure and even Microsoft themselves recommends the use of a different VPN protocol. While PPTP may be fine for normal, everyday, home use, if you need to access confidential or sensitive data please do not use PPTP. Your best option would be to use OpenVPN or L2TP/IPsec as they are far more secure than PPTP.

...and don't forget: In VMware vCenter you can better adjust permissions based on single VMs or group of VMs ... Sys Center VM Manager ... is not really good for that...

ESXi, because I had experience with it from when I worked at Dell. If you run the paid version, the features are incredibly flexible. A cluster of three ESXi nodes that have VSAN enabled can have an entire host go offline, and you lose none of your VMs or storage. You can enable flash caching at the hypervisor level to give every VM a performance boost.
 
If I didn't have knowledge about how to use ESXi, I would probably go for a Linux-based approach, since the VMs I run are Linux. The free version of ESXi misses out on a lot of the good stuff. On the other hand, ESXi is great because it supports many different networking and storage setups out of the box.

I agree if your setup only contains Windows OS.
 
But if you have a mixed environment like Windows, RedHat Linux, Sun Solaris and Oracle OS, you can't really go Hyper-V (especially when you have some older Sun Solaris installations can't easily upgrade the OS to fit to Hyper-V)
 
And the "free" comes with a different price-tag: Hyper-V is made for Windows OS as Guests ... and those needs licensing....
 
AND... Hyper-V needs a local disk to be installed to and can't boot from USB or CF (like ESX) (my setup contains multiple Hosts without any local disk, only CF with ESX and the rest of the storage if FC ... I know "boot from FC" is possible, but a complete pain-in-the-a** )
 
BUT
Everyone can use whatever you want ... this thread is not meant to "convert" people over to using different software ...
I just like to hear the pros and cons for either of any

Well, depending on your business model, not always can you give up your own datacenter and go into the "cloud" (like in Germany we have some laws for Banks [money] using the own datacenter)...

SQL Server is a Microsoft product - it's for housing databases (at a basic level, or the more complete answer is that it's an RDBMS). The info which hasn't been mentioned here is the flavour or tier, the version being installed... each version has different hardware limits (as well as costs) associated and could impact the plans & any recommendations we all make here.
 
For the mentioning of backups, I fully agree with all points manikyath made above. For the server itself, I completely agree with most above - it sounds like you've got the enthusiasm & passion of a hobbiest but are a little out of your depth in the corporate world in this scenario. Building your own server would be cool, but (i) not cost efficient and (ii) would likely (reading from above) lead to overspecced hardware which would be wasted (iii) wouldn't be as tested as anything an off-the-shelf server vendor would produce. Also (iv) might not be as mainable or future proof either (with hot swap drives, space for multiple NICs or CPUs etc.). I am impressed you looked at Xeon's and ECC memory, but the idea of having any not onboard GPU and watercooling should be left to the gamer/PC upgrade fanatic area away from servers.

Well, there are a lot of problems with hosting your own server especially on a home Windows Platform which is the security risks. 
Opening Ports on your router side causes problems and can allow people to access network resources and even resources on your PC that you wouldn't want anyone accessing. 
 
If you're on Windows IIS offers a free, easy and built in way to enable FTP.  In terms of the Firewall, generally the port is TCP-21.  
 

I know everyone (especially Linus) likes custom made servers ...
 
but why not a real server (like HP ProLiant or Cisco UCS or Dell PowerEdge or .... you get the idea)

@leadeater Good point, but try putting your TL;DR on top 
 
It really depends on what you want: Cheap but with many risks (like no support from OS- and application-vendor) or quality hardware (but with higher price).
 

Compatibility of an HP server will be far and away better than anything anyone could build using parts. That is the point of buying from these hardware vendors, they do all the testing and validation of parts and produce a qualified parts list that is guaranteed to work or money back, you don't get this building yourself.
 
Also the firmware/bios is far superior to Supermicro and anything lesser to them, another reason for why compatibility is better than self built.
 
You can upgrade HP servers yourself, you can even use non qualified parts or 3rd party cheaper equivalents. The only caveat to this is you must be sure it will work but this is no different to a self built server.
 
I can keep listing reasons as to why self built cannot match proper hardware vendors but since there is so many more and some require a good deal of explaining the page scrolling would be annoying and it would never be read. At work we are an HP shop, we tried Supermicro and that was a cold hard lesson to never do that again. It's not that Supermicro make bad servers or are generally less reliable but the support framework around their products is not sufficient for our business requirements and the amount of servers we have.
 
TL:DR You can't build something better than HP, IBM, Dell only cheaper. Often you'll end up building something less reliable while trying to do so, you get what you pay for.

we have enough subforums on this forum already
i dont want to scroll down any further, thanks
 
if youre looking for a specific topic about server or client just use the search

I know everyone (especially Linus) likes custom made servers ...
 
but why not a real server (like HP ProLiant or Cisco UCS or Dell PowerEdge or .... you get the idea)

I agree, thats why I said give it a few years... personally its a MUCH better setup than any other Hypervisors as it uses its microkernallization meaning you dont have to wait for support by Hyper-V (in theory) to use whatever product you want on it:
 
 

ESXI licensing is still vastly more costly than buying a Windows Server licence, not to mention when Azure gets off the ground it will have the best cloud support (something VMware is not able to get a grip of yet)

...and don't forget: In VMware vCenter you can better adjust permissions based on single VMs or group of VMs ... Sys Center VM Manager ... is not really good for that...

VMware. We need to managed over 1000 VMs across multiple sites with DR and have good integration with Netapp storage and Commvault backups. The only one that truly meets all these requirements is VMware.
 
Hyper-V in Server 2016 has made some very important improvements but still falls way short when compared to vCenter etc versus System Center Virtual Machine Manager etc.

Well, adding the drivers doesn't work for the Storage drivers:
 
When you install the VMware Tools, then all drivers are in Windows. When you have first the LSI SCSI controller in your VM and want to switch it to the VMware Paravirtual SCSI controller, then you will get a Blue Screen on the first boot (because Windows didn't load the driver at least once .... just having it in the driver store doesn't help).
 
The trick is:
Leave Windows turned on Edit the VM configuration Adding a new disk in VMware and for this disk, select a different SCSI-controller ID (like 1:x instead of 0:x) (this will add a new SCSI controller) Before pressing OK to close VM config window, change the newly added SCSI controller from LSI to VMware Paravirtual click OK Windows will first then detect the new SCSI controller, loads the driver and then adds the new disk (but don't change the disk in Windows ... leave it "uninitialized) shut down Windows edit the VM configuration and remove the newly added disk (this will also remove the newly added VMware Paravirtual SCSI controller) Change the existing LSI controller now to the VMware Paravirtual Start Windows again If you have more then one disk added, go to Windows Disk Management, see the other "offline" disk -> Right click and select to take "online" Reboot again This is for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 R2 ... why ever Windows is not loading the SCSI driver after changing the hardware IF it never have loaded the driver (and leading into Blue Screens on reboot)
 
 

The advantage with proprietary RAID cards (lie HP SmartArray P420 as example) is: when your RAID card fails, you can easily replace the RAID card with one of the same line and it will work (because the information of that RAID is stored also on the disks themselves). The disadvantage is: you stick to that RAID card and replacing with newer or better cards is a real pain or impossible (so once decided on HP SmartArray P420 as RAID controller, you have to keep using it and can't just upgrade it to another card or another vendor).
The other advantage with those RAID cards is: they are independent to the OS (so Windows will show the LUN the same like Linux would do).

@leadeater Good Point.
 
The only "problem" would be some drivers but should be able to work around if you select your destination VM in ESX to go with the LSI SCSI - controller (instead of using VMware Paravirtual SCSI) or selecting the Intel e1000 Ethernet Adapter.
 
So the basic rule for P2V (physical to Virtual) conversation is: convert first to standardized hardware (like the LSI SCSI - Controller or the Intel e1000 Ethernet), then Add the VMware Tools to the client and then convert to the better VMware - based Controllers (like SCSI or Ethernet).
 
@AerusVi: The VMware Converter is a software that needs components being installed on the source machine (either the Agent and doing the conversion from a different machine or the complete software and starting the process from inside the source-OS).

The solution I had was that i picked up a HP Proliant ML350 G6 server, supports up to 200GB RAM 2 Xeon processors X5570s and it takes 6 Hard drives off the bat, The biggest bonus is that it also comes with the HP Raid card above which would be my solution also. The other thing I would point out is that the server has ultra low power options and the fans were quieter than my HTPC and the server itself cost less than £100 / $150 USD. The other advantage is that these units are built for enterprise and therefore reliable, I migrated my 5tb disk from one machine and literally plugged it into another machine with a HP card and it detected it provisioned it and it was totally painless with zero config required , Not even a reboot!
 
Just another option

This.
 
N40L is a very nimble machine and I find Freenas a bit dangerous and OTT for the average user, You cant go wrong with Synology especially the performance it gets from that little AMD chip