apt2vanish

I am building this server for a school, (not state, but private) I need some help.
there are 50 desktops that will be connected through a wireless N network. The last server we build was bought at fry's, and it had water damage from a bad storm we had (bad roof, but has been replaced)

I want to build a real server this time, however I dont want to spend $10,000 just for one server.
Here is a wish list from newegg......tell me what yall think.

__________________

We Are Gr33n Machine

PhenomII x4 955BE 3.914Ghz@1.536
E8500 Wolfdale 4.284GHz@1.392v

mdogg

can you take a screenshot?

__________________
Some stuff I made

Good Linux Users Don’t Talk About Microsoft

Really, I’m not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.– Linus Torvalds

apt2vanish

Yeah, but I just went ahead and made a code of it.......updated now

__________________

We Are Gr33n Machine

PhenomII x4 955BE 3.914Ghz@1.536
E8500 Wolfdale 4.284GHz@1.392v

mdogg

what's the use of the server?

I wouldn't get a dark knight for it.

I would take a look at this RAID controller:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816103099

__________________
Some stuff I made

Good Linux Users Don’t Talk About Microsoft

Really, I’m not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.– Linus Torvalds

ZHoob2004

might I advise this to you?

http://www.overclock.net/intel-build...wish-list.html

also, if you're going i7 for a server I would say make a real server with dual i7 to make it last a little more into the future without a whole lot extra.

__________________
My case mod project: Millennium Falcon

Manyak

What is it going to be used for?

It looks very unoptimized for anything I can think of, especially in a school. But it's hard to help you much unless you've got some more information:

- What they're going to do with it
- If there are any other servers working with it (like, is it going to get data off of a SAN for example, or is it going to be part of a load balancing cluster, etc)
- How critical the data is
- What sort of backup they are going to use

__________________
For Sale: [Conus] CM Storm Scout, TEC, WC, Laptop, A900, Model M, GPU, Audio, and a ton more!!

apt2vanish

Ah that is a nice raid controller, I like it. Would be more relaible, and faster. But what about support from Adaptec?
Thanks for the link! also I think that making it a dual chip server is a tad over the budget, but I will see.....any suggestions on what motherboard would be good for that?
What do you mean very unoptimized?
It will be used for active directory, terminal server, data storage, and for documents to be scanned and shared.
2TB drives in Raid1 for server 2008 OS, then 4TB drives in Raid 6, or Raid 10 for Data storage.
It will be the main server for the time being. The priority is for redundant data storage.
I am no expert at this by the way, but I know some things about it like clustering, and creating failover servers, even exchange servers, etc.
Have about 2yrs experience. They can't afford to pay a specialized tech to do all this, so I volunteer, and spend alot of time helping them.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

__________________

We Are Gr33n Machine

PhenomII x4 955BE 3.914Ghz@1.536
E8500 Wolfdale 4.284GHz@1.392v

Manyak

I don't mean to insult your knowledge or anything, just that a few things threw me off.

Ok well for starters, you should switch the RAID card to the Highpoint 4320 or Adaptec 5805. The 4320 is both cheaper and faster than the one you picked (IOP348 @ 1.2GHz), and the Adaptec is there as a choice because Highpoint's software and customer service absolutely suck and it'll be quite a bit faster as well. If money isn't an issue go with the Adaptec, just make sure you give it enough cooling as the heatsink that comes with it is passive.

Second, don't do the 2TB drives for your OS. What you want is for one small drive for the OS & Active Directory Log, one drive for Active Directory SYSVOL and Database, and one for terminal services apps. Keeping these drives separate will give you the best performance with this many concurrent users, even if they are slower than the massive 2TB ones. You 'd benefit a lot, by the way, from using a single 15k RPM SAS drive for those three (Cheetah 15k.5/6 are excellent), then just backing them up nightly or however often to a single massive SATA drive. Or just use RAID1 for them and skip the SATA drive, but I figure that's a good way to save money. Then of course the giant storage array as you have it.

Also, since it's TCP connections are going to be long-term (as opposed to web-server style where it's making and breaking connections constantly) you might want to look into a nice TOE card. The Intel Pro/1000 PT or MT cards (or HP NC360T rebrand), Broadcom NetXtreme II cards, or any of Chelsio's many gigabit cards can all be found for pretty cheap on ebay and will offload all or most of the network processing so the CPU can concentrate on the terminal services apps. Depending on the terminal apps you may also want to use LACP to combine several gigabit cards so that all 50 users can have a full 100Mbit connection to themselves. But even if all you want is a single gigabit connection, these cards will be faster than the onboard NICs of any motherboard.

Also, is expandability a concern? Since it's going to be hosting terminal services you may want to go with a dual-CPU board so that there's room to add another CPU later on down the line. It'll make it easy to upgrade once it starts getting a bit slow for the school's apps since they'll only have to buy an additional CPU, not a whole new server. And keep in mind that - all other things being equal - two quad core CPUs are faster than a signle 8-core CPU because you end up with 6 memory channels, not just 3. So depending on the apps and future processors, simply adding a CPU might be even better than upgrading it.

__________________
For Sale: [Conus] CM Storm Scout, TEC, WC, Laptop, A900, Model M, GPU, Audio, and a ton more!!

apt2vanish

I'm still trying to visualize the raid and/or drive config your talking about. Not sure about upgrading any network hardware yet cause they will be moving to fiber and I dont know what that might consist of just yet. Right now everything is temporary, but I just want to create a solid foundation (one server) to start off with. I am almost positive my boss is a "know it all" dips**t and the config for our stuff, and the schools could be much better (reliable, secure, fast) we do share a 6meg pipe. Or so I'm told.
Where might I read to understand the AD log stuff and how to setup the correct drives, partitions.
(I do remember when we were setting up failover exchange servers, there was an option for config the partitions, o drives for exactly what your talking about, however we bypassed that and put our log files for exchange, and AC on a 100GB partition created from the four 500GB hard drives setup in raid 10.

__________________

We Are Gr33n Machine

PhenomII x4 955BE 3.914Ghz@1.536
E8500 Wolfdale 4.284GHz@1.392v

Manyak

The AD stuff is easy, there's only the database, log, and SYSVOL folders (SYSVOL stores settings like your group policies and what not). If you can put them each on a separate drive then great (the log can be kept on the system drive with only the tiniest bit of performance loss, and the other two kept together until about 200 users as long as the drive is decent).

As for the network I obviously can't speak for the school, but fibre is usually only used where you need > 10Gbe (anything less and aggregating 1Gbps copper ports is still cheaper unless it means adding a switch), when you want to make long distance connections such as between buildings, or when there's so much electrical interference that copper is no longer reliable. Obviously I have no idea how the layout is over there, but maybe you can make a good guess as to what they'd use between the server and wireless AP's.

__________________
For Sale: [Conus] CM Storm Scout, TEC, WC, Laptop, A900, Model M, GPU, Audio, and a ton more!!