judenihal

Hello. I have 3 servers right now in one house, I am planning to deploy a Domain Controller, Exchange Server and Domain Controller.

Now, this is perfect to do and is not a problem, BUT when I do this, the servers will eat up TONS of power. Can I enable these 3 servers to standby when there is no network and hard drive activity on them? How do I do this?

lattyware

Well, wake-on-lan exists, so I imagine you could, if you were clever, get the router to notice requests coming in and send WOL packets, then have them automatically go into sleep after so much inactivity. You'd probably have to write a lot of code yourself though, and use a router that supports DD-WRT or something, or use one of the PCs always on as control, then the other two can be started up/turned off as needed, as one would have to be always on to stop people having to wait for a server to turn on.

My first thought would be this:

Set up one PC as a control. This would be always on. Have some monitoring software so when CPU usage (or whatever other factors you wanted) reached 90%, say, for x minutes then it'd send a WOL packet to one of the other servers. This would wake up and take some load.
You could then make the same thing happen with the third server as usage climbs again. Have servers 2 and 3 go into sleep mode when they have had low usage for x minutes.

Just my initial thoughts on how I'd go about it.

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the_beast

I reckon I can save 1/3 of the power you use by recommending you only have 1 domain controller...

Not sure on other limitations with your server applications as I haven't had much chance to play with them yet. But I know Hyper-V won't allow a server to standby, so if you need it you can't Standby that machine.

You could use a DD-WRT router or similar - in fact I use one to allow me to send magic packets from my wireless laptop. Never tried to automate it though.

You can also set up most network cards to wake on activity rather than only on magic packets - have a look in the network card properties & see. Not sure how all this will affect your network though - I suspect it will mess things up somewhat if your domain controller is offline most of the time.

Manyak

Simple - run only one machine.

Use ESXi to create two VMs - one for the domain controller and the other for the Exchange Server.

If you're using two domain controllers just for redundancy then forget it, you don't need it in your home. If you're doing it to run two different domains then just create a third VM for another DC.

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judenihal

Guys take a look at this:

http://www.computing.net/answers/net...ers/38562.html

The people over there are telling me NOT to run a DC in a VM, so that confuses me as well.

Manyak, I am thinking of running a Terminal Server, which will also be an Internet Gateway. I am also thinking of making the Domain Controller a File Server, using my existing NTFS Hard Drives. The problem with this is that, VMware ESX Server does not support Physical LUNS, but I know it can be done, but its not recommended by VMware, so I don't know.

I think running 3 servers is the best way to go, but if I can standby the servers when inactive, then that might be the best.

Manyak

He's only saying he's worried about the RAM:
In the second post he's only giving you an example for a business deployment, because splitting up the roles across different physical hardware makes it easier to recover from downtime (and allows for many, many more users). But in your case, being that this is all for your house and you've got less than a handful of users, it doesn't really matter.

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killnine

Check out "Core Parking" in Server 2008 R2:

http://thelazyadmin.com/blogs/thelaz...e-parking.aspx


Basically allows you to power down multiple cores for lower power consumption

At the MS conference I was just at they spoke about how R2 can actually shut down whole servers in a clustered environment if usage is low enough to warrant it. However, this is only supported on some AMD and Intel chipsets (I think it works sorta like Wake-On-LAN with a magic packet, but dont know any details).

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Burn

In my experience (with a quad core running CP), the power savings is barely noticeable. I might have noticed a 2-4W savings, if any at all, when I had all 3 cores parked simultaneously.

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DigitalPhreak

I have to question why you would run 3 different servers to do this and then want them to be on standby. Why wouldnt you just run your DC and exchange on the same server? Not a MS best practice but it can be done without a hitch. And why a secondary DC? If you want them to be on stand by then its apparent that high availability is of not much concern.

There is also the virtualization option. You could run your dc on a server and then put exchange on a virtual server. In this case a secondary DC would again be pointless. Unless you are just fiddling which you could run the secondary on a virtual server as well.

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judenihal

I KNOW! I want to run Exchange Server On Top Of My Domain Controller!

People however are advising me against this:

http://www.computing.net/answers/win...ller/9420.html

I want one server for DC, Another for Exchange and the 3rd one for Terminal Services.

Right now, I am testing, I strongly believe that the Exchange Server should be in a VMware on top of the DC and I might deploy it that way, the fact that I have added extra 2 GB of RAM in it and the Processor supports VT.