Tips for building a VM server

[Orgino]

 

Hi,

I am new to the whole server building world so please excuse my ignorance and correct me if I am going in the wrong direction.

So I run a small IT company along with my studies, and I now need a server for hosting a website and some files for a customer.

My idea is that I want to build a server which I can easily expand and is capable of running a couple of VMs through operating systems like UnRaid or FreeNAS.

Currently the main use of the server will be to store files and run an apache server for hosting the files for the client.

 

When it comes to backing up the data I’m planning on running a Raid 5 array with a parity disk. I know this is not a proper backup so I would appreciate any advice on how I should preform external backups .

 

And now I finally come to my question what hardware combination do you recommend for me to buy?

Budget is around 800 USD. (Can be increased if needed)

I currently own a "AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition" from a old personal rig, can this be used as "alright" cpu for the server or should I go for more server grade cpus?

 

Thanks for taking the time and helping me out

 

[KuJoe]

If you're going to be using this for your business, my advice is just build a server with enterprise hardware and run either Proxmox (open source) or ESXi (free for single hosts). You can easily do this within your budget and you'll be much happier in the long run.

 

Go get a Dell PowerEdge R610 off eBay for ~$400 with a ton of RAM (I think you can get one with dual 6-core Xeons and 96GB of DDR3 ECC RAM for under $400 now), get a Dell H700 RAID controller with a battery backup (sometimes included, otherwise add $100), and then get 6x 2.5" SATA or SAS drives and you're sitting nicely with a extremely powerful server with redundant power, 4x GigE NICs, dual Xeons (12 cores, 24 threads), hardware RAID with BBU, 6x hot swapable drives, and ECC RAM.

 

I personally have an R610 with 6x 300GB 10k SAS drives in RAID10, 24GB of RAM, 2x X6560 Xeons, and a 1TB SATA drive mounted on a PCI card running ESXi 5.5 in a data center with 2x 1Gbps uplinks and I love it.

 

I have very little experience with FreeNAS and unRAID, but my advice is stick with something enterprise level if you're using it for work. Also, hardware RAID is so much easier than dealing with software solutions.

 

Lastly, for backing up my ESXi host I use ghettoVCB and backup my VMs to my 1TB drive. Proxmox has multiple solutions also for backing up your KVM VM or container depending on which you deploy.

[Orgino]

Do you think this would be a good deal for the Dell PowerEdge R610 and is the included raid card fine? http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/DELL-POWEREDGE-R610-1U-SERVER-2-XEON-QUAD-CORE-E5620-2-40GHZ-12GB-RAM-/141910645149?hash=item210a88999d:g:F3UAAOSwcdBWSwGZ

or this one?

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Dell-PowerEdge-R610-2x-Quad-Core-2-13GHZ-L5630-Rack-Server-32GB-DDR3-RAM-PERC6-/401073788077?hash=item5d61dc54ad:g:Xh8AAOSwx-9WxeCh#viTabs_0

[KuJoe]

They both include a PERC6 which isn't bad, but not as good as the H700 card. It would definitely work for you, but the PERC6 has less cache and I believe limits SATA drives to SATA II speeds (3Gbps instead of 6Gbps).

[Blake]

People recommending 2nd hand hardware for business use? seems like it might be a little mission critical?

 

Just use AWS or Azure to host it, it's OPEX, and you won't be able to get better HA till your ready to spend Enterprise $$$.

[pat-e]

Some companies doesn't just allow OPEX and needs CAPEX...

 

But: The second server is not that bad (especially more RAM is always useful when running VMs).

When you are using VMware ESXi, I suggest for the Backup: Check Veeam for VM-Backups. Veeam offers a "free" solution (limitations are: limited support, only manual backups, no API interface and no Powershell). The paid version of Veeam offers automated backup (scheduled backups), none of the limitations.

The "good" thing with Veeam is: it is also officially supported by VMware themselves (because Veeam is a partner of VMware).

[dalekphalm]

8 hours ago, Blake said:

People recommending 2nd hand hardware for business use? seems like it might be a little mission critical?

 

Just use AWS or Azure to host it, it's OPEX, and you won't be able to get better HA till your ready to spend Enterprise $$$.

I'm going to second this - if the application/guest OS's/data are mission critical, then getting used hardware? Kind of a big risk.

 

Think about this: Given all of the savings you'll get buying second hand hardware, what are you going to do if something dies prematurely due to hardware failure or hardware defect?

 

If the item was new, you'd simply RMA the part under warranty. Most enterprise equipment comes with excellent warranty, and you can often opt for premium service.

 

Eg: Dell has a 24/7 mission critical warranty w/ next day on-site parts delivery or repairs (whatever applies). So if your primary host server goes down due to a faulty motherboard, you can call Dell at 3:45 AM, and they'll get a part sent out for the next business day (Possibly even same business day), WITH a technician on-site to swap the boards.

 

Even if you opt for the lesser warranty, it's still next business day for parts delivery. You can have this warranty span the 1-year basic, or the industry standard 3 or 5 years.

 

HP and other server vendors will all have similar warranties on their new stuff. SuperMicro probably does too if they sell complete systems.

 

If this is a SOHO (Smal Office or Home Office), then you probably can get away with used hardware, especially if you can stand extended amounts of downtime and large unexpected expenses (Eg: up to a week of downtime, with the potential for you having to REPURCHASE a new server after the one you have dies), then sure, take the risk.

If this is for a larger business, or downtime beyond a day is unacceptable, or you cannot justify large expenses like buying a new server out of nowhere, then you should strongly consider stretching your budget to get new w/ warranty.

 

Remember, a business cannot run on "Well it PROBABLY won't die on us".

[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.

[dalekphalm]

9 minutes ago, pat-e said:

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.

Of course, every scenario is different. The point I'm making is that as a startup, if a server dies and you need to replace it, you simply might not have enough cashflow yet to handle such a large unexpected cost. It might sink your company before you can get past it. Having a warranty means you've paid upfront, and the cost is already known if a failure happens.

 

Obviously each person will determine what is appropriate for themselves. I'm just warning people of the potential downfalls and unplanned expenditures that used hardware can bring.

 

If the OP (or anyone else) says: Yes, the risk is acceptable. Then that's all that is needed, and they can buy used and be happy with the cost savings.

 

However, many people will buy used and not consider the downsides.

[Orgino]

I clearly see the advantages of having a new server under manufactory warranty. But can I get anything decent for 800-1000 USD which I can expand on later? And if so are there any specific models you would recommend?

 

[dalekphalm]

20 minutes ago, Orgino said:

 

I clearly see the advantages of having a new server under manufactory warranty. But can I get anything decent for 800-1000 USD which I can expand on later? And if so are there any specific models you would recommend?

 

I understand price is a factor - for sure. To be honest, I'm not sure I can recommend anything within the $1000 or under price range that will fit your needs.

 

Can you go into a bit more detail about what the server is actually going to do? Is it just a glorified File Server (NAS), or will it be running additional services, VM's, etc?

 

If it's just a file server, then you could probably get away with one of Dell's (or HP, or pretty well any server OEM vendor) entry level servers. But including the HDD's, it's probably going to cost you more than $1000 USD.

 

Just looking on Dell's website (Retail pricing, no discounts), you can get a ~$600 server but the CPU is a damn Celeron G1620 (2C/2T) which, I suppose would probably be fine for a file server - just don't expect super great performance.

 

You could buy something like that, and toss in 4x large HDD's. For OS you could use Windows and do hardware RAID, or FreeNAS and do ZFS.

 

Whatever you do, make sure that your OS is installed on a separate HDD or SSD, not part of your actual storage array.

[Orgino]

 

At this moment in time I need a server where I can store files securely and which can virtualize a couple of Ubuntu servers which will be running apache and other light weight services I am going to host for them, traffic on these services would be small. I guess you could call it a glorified NAS server since I don't need a lot of performance but more the reliability to store data securely. But it would be nice when I’m actually investing in a server to buy something which can do a little more than just host files and run a webserver. Downtime is not a huge issue as long as the data is still there after issue is resolved.

[Jarsky]

I would be considering seperating your storage from your VM cluster.

You cannot run FreeNAS as a virtual machine (except for a test build of FreeNAS 9.1 i think it was) and it's not recommended to run an array with hardware passthrough to a VM.

Typically you should run the array on its own dedicated hardware, and either create a share (CIFS/SMB) or connect it as an iSCSi target to your virtualisation hypervisor.

This is fairly easy with a hypervisor like ESXi (i believe you can get ESXi 5 for free still?)

 

Also bare in mind that if you want to run a server with ECC then you cannot use that CPU - You really need server grade gear.

Virtual Machines become memory & core hungry, so you'll want to look at multicore Xeons & motherboards that support multiple sockets and a good number of dimm slots for memory expansion. The LGA1366 dual socket boards are quite affordable, as are the Nehalem generation of Xeon's. Plenty of pre-built server options available as above - which is the best way to go for reliability. Dell, HP, IBM, SuperMicro.

 

If you don't have someone saavy that knows about all this stuff, and you're just hosting webapp type stuff for customers, I would recommend just using hosted dedicated servers or cloud computing like Azure/AWS.

 

Some things you have to think about if hosting at home for a business:

- What sort of SLA are you providing your 'customers'?

- How are you going to fulfil that SLA in the event of a hardware failure?

- Who is going to troubleshoot catastrophic hardware/configuration issues, if you have no experience with this stuff?

- Are you using a consumer broadband connection? Does it support what is required for hosting - such as bandwidth, reverse dns, multiple public IP options, etc..?

- If you are on a consumer broadband connection, what is your SLA in the event of an outage?

- Do you have a UPS solution for maintaining your servers in the event of a powercut?

[twisties]

On 3/1/2016 at 8:51 AM, Jarsky said:

ESXi (i believe you can get ESXi 5 for free still?)

Yup, it's still free, and I use it at home myself.