I am starting to look around for servers to replace Super Fast Virtual Mofo (SFVM) which hosts all of my virtual machines. I haven’t looked seriously at hardware in many years, actually since I built SFVM in 2007. As you may have noticed by how quiet it has been around here I have been exceptionally busy the last few years with work. I intend to force some time to start working on stuff because I want/need some updates to several utilities and have a ton of ideas for other utilities and the creativity is about to blow out my brain if I don’t let it out.
So with that info… What should I be looking at now for hardware? As with SFVM I expect to be building it from the MOBO up unless there is something really good, flexible, and reasonably priced that doesn’t require me to go to a single place for parts and upgrades.
I am thinking of spending between $1000-$5000 on hardware, between 2-4 servers I think not including storage. I have a QNAP TS-469L-US that I intend to use for backend disk if it can stand up to the load and expect to have an SSD for boot and system. I am not overly concerned about graphics capability as I haven’t sat and looked at the actual console of SFVM but maybe 20 times since first building it in 2007. Memory, CPUs, and reduced power reqs but high perf are going to be my focus unless someone says no you idiot… You need to think about X.
The use of this new hardware will be to set up a cluster that can run a bunch of virtuals. As a general rule I tend to have one one small set of of 3-4 virtuals that I run all of the time that run basic functions for my environment and then I have pools I fire up and run as needed for various testing (W2K forests, K3 forests, K12 forests, mixed forests, really big forests, etc.) and would like to have the ability to run more at once.
I expect it will desktop/tower style but I do have 4 or 5 old PDP-11 racks in the pole barn I can leverage if needed – well I would leverage one, I don’t see needing all 4-5 of them LOL. I would have to increase my cooling capacity if that were the case.
So tell me what you think!
joe
I almost feel a little dirty saying this, if you have a MSDN subscription then you may already have enough Azure time not to need hardware.
I went to a very interesting session about how to host a Minecraft server on Azure and I was very very surprised at how good the offering was.