Soldato
You can't judge the cost without knowing the warranty supplied. If it's 8x5 NBD for 1yr then it's a rip, if it 24x7x4hr for 7yrs then it's a bargain!
Show Us Your Racks
- Thread starter Dangerous
- Start date
You can't judge the cost without knowing the warranty supplied. If it's 8x5 NBD for 1yr then it's a rip, if it 24x7x4hr for 7yrs then it's a bargain!
I spent some time today with one of the IT techs from the company we use and he said we didn't need the server quoted. We looked at our server performance and came to the conclusion another CPU may work, after searching around for a bit I bought the complete below server for £250.00. I just spent another £150.00 on hexcore 2.93mhz Xeons. I know its not epic power but for what we need its fits the bill until i can stomach spending a shed load on a server to run Terminal Services for 15 people. We're currently running a quad core 2.13mhz xeon e5506.
CPU Speed: 2.93Ghz
CPU Type: Intel X5570 Xeon CPU
Number of Physical CPUs: 2
Number of cores per CPU: 4
Total cores: 8
Installed RAM: 72GB
Hard Drive bays: 1TB HDD Storage (7 x 146GB)
Storage Controller: HP Smart Array P410i/512 MB BBWC Controller (RAID 0/1/1+0/5/5+0)
Power Supplies: Dual 750W Power Supplies
CPU Speed: 2.93Ghz
CPU Type: Intel X5570 Xeon CPU
Number of Physical CPUs: 2
Number of cores per CPU: 4
Total cores: 8
Installed RAM: 72GB
Hard Drive bays: 1TB HDD Storage (7 x 146GB)
Storage Controller: HP Smart Array P410i/512 MB BBWC Controller (RAID 0/1/1+0/5/5+0)
Power Supplies: Dual 750W Power Supplies
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that should easily run double the number of users you have planned
back in t'day I had 60 users on a 2x1ghz machine for a whole day once without a single complaint about performance, it was during an outage of a better machine and the users weren't even aware that a box we normally had 15 people on had 60 instead
biggest issue we would have normaly was a-hole excel 'experts' doing finance reporting who would fill 65,000 rows with VLOOKUPs and leave auto calculation enabled, everytime they change a cell it would kill a CPU for an hour recalculating
idiots would run this kind of stuff right in the middle of the working day too, they wouldn't change their way of doing it because what did I know I was IT not finance, so I turned to peer pressure. any time they ran it I informed the rest of finance who was making their systems run badly and have them turn on each other 'what? yes I know its slow but dave gormless has to run a report that is super important so I cant kill it'
in fact it still applies to this day, anytime a big system grinds to a halt its always some gormless reporting user who ran something against the entire DB without limiting the scope
back in t'day I had 60 users on a 2x1ghz machine for a whole day once without a single complaint about performance, it was during an outage of a better machine and the users weren't even aware that a box we normally had 15 people on had 60 instead
biggest issue we would have normaly was a-hole excel 'experts' doing finance reporting who would fill 65,000 rows with VLOOKUPs and leave auto calculation enabled, everytime they change a cell it would kill a CPU for an hour recalculating
idiots would run this kind of stuff right in the middle of the working day too, they wouldn't change their way of doing it because what did I know I was IT not finance, so I turned to peer pressure. any time they ran it I informed the rest of finance who was making their systems run badly and have them turn on each other 'what? yes I know its slow but dave gormless has to run a report that is super important so I cant kill it'
in fact it still applies to this day, anytime a big system grinds to a halt its always some gormless reporting user who ran something against the entire DB without limiting the scope
Soldato
2012 R2 has a "fair share" feature on RDS so one user can't kill for all - I'm building a new RDS server at work with 2012 R2 and it's looking very good in testing as we have the same issue.
This is a Gen8 microserver running 31 users (16GB RAM the standard CPU) when we had a prolonged outage - I threw it together to get by.
It did max out a few times but coped surprisingly well considering it was replacing a dual CPU DL380 G5. RAM is more important than CPU for RDS although normally twice that number of users.
Soldato
That's cheap - what is the actual unit it's in? 8 cores will easily run 15 users and then some so 12 will be bored most of the time
What OS are you going to use? 2008 R2 most versions can only user 32GB RAM but 2012 can make use of the full 72GB (I presume you're going to take the opportunity to vitualise?).That's cheap - what is the actual unit it's in? 8 cores will easily run 15 users and then some so 12 will be bored most of the time
You'll have to excuse my knowledge level, I pay the bills and run the company!
The box is a HP DL380 G6, if you look at the refurbished costs of these they are still quite high, so I hope I got a bit of a bargain, it includes 90 days warranty. For a company of our size I couldn't justify the expense of new one at 4k, thanks to you guys sowing those seeds in the mind there.
We are currently running two ESXi(?) VMs one is for the domain controller and applications, that is backed up to the cloud and a local Microserver in case of failure. The other VM is our terminal services. We are indeed running 2012, and from what i understand we have two licences which can cover two physical CPUs
I get the kit on Wednesday so our guy is coming back in to check over the RAM and HDs to see whats in it. I may upgrade those as well, faster RAM, larger drives, we'll see.
The Microserver will become our CCTV box as that has 2 x 1TB drives in it. The old server which is a ML330 G6 will become our backup box, I think.
There is nothing here that is so important that a day or two being down will cause us an issue and shut the business down, worst case we can run the business/accounts from laptops, I work on a 2010 macbook pro most of the time!
I decided to move the emails to Office 365 for added protection against an internal systems failure.
Soldato
That is a good price - not much more than what I just paid for a G7 with a single CPU and much less ram.
Once 2012 R2 licence covers two VMs assuming the host isn't running 2012 R2 and also other roles - which if you're using ESXI it isn't.
Installing it on a G6 can be a bit of a pain but it is perfectly possible.
Once 2012 R2 licence covers two VMs assuming the host isn't running 2012 R2 and also other roles - which if you're using ESXI it isn't.
Installing it on a G6 can be a bit of a pain but it is perfectly possible.
Deleted member 138126
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Deleted member 138126
Mate, you legend!!! 31 users off a Microserver -- thought I'd seen everything!!!
Soldato
Mate, you legend!!! 31 users off a Microserver -- thought I'd seen everything!!!
Wasn't out of choice but needs must! The NLB for the two existing ones failed big time refusing to let anyone on and while the consultants were head scratching I nipped home for it and threw it together.
We have one web based app but the rest is MS Office based so fortunately nothing too hard loading. That and keeping the number of users down saved our bacon
Soldato
True - although it was still 8 cores vs 2 and 32GB RAM vs 16GB. 10K RPM vs (IIRC) 7.2K etc.
The other TS is a Gen8 DL380 but total 100 users over both down to 31.
Since then the G5 has been doing random restarts with more than about 20 users so we've had to bias towards the Gen8 hence me building the new one (on a DL380 Gen9 - which will be the company's first virtualised server). Which reminds me... new thread time.
The other TS is a Gen8 DL380 but total 100 users over both down to 31.
Since then the G5 has been doing random restarts with more than about 20 users so we've had to bias towards the Gen8 hence me building the new one (on a DL380 Gen9 - which will be the company's first virtualised server). Which reminds me... new thread time.
Soldato
It took 5 years to get the rack in a locked air conditioned room. 10 years for this level of change is good.
DCs are a bit of a special case, I would recommend against ever running anything on a DC with the exception of other AD roles (cert services, ADFS) and networking roles like DNS, DHCP, WINS
The key trouble is on a normal server you have a set of local groups and permissions, the domain accounts are given access to them by being added in during the domain join process.
On a DC there are no local accounts, that means any permissions those apps have are using the domain groups. If it creates a 'local' service account and puts it in users or admins, that service account is in the domain wide users or admins. If it runs as a service under the SYSTEM account, then basically that application can do whatever it likes with your domain, if that app happens to be poorly written and could be exploited to make it do something unintended it has the keys to your kingdom, That is much more access to your AD than you would ever want something to have
Those permissions are also not DC specific, they will work against all DCs. A bit of uncommon knowledge is that all DCs when they join to the domain actually change their SID to the SID/identifier of the very first DC that created the domain because all domain groups will be derivative of that SID, so the DCs unlike other machines all share the same SID
In short it would be worth creating another VM for those apps and uninstalling them from your DC
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Thanks for that detailed post I'll chat with my guy on Wednesday about what you have just said, I found out my new buy has 18 sticks of 4gb 1333mhz RAM fitted. I've read the clock speed drops if i want to add close to the maximum of 192gb.
I highly doubt we'll need more RAM our current server has 72gb and the bottle neck was CPU usage.
Soldato
Hmm, now you mention it, looking back at your pictures that is a bit of a short rack. Looks too long for just for switches though so a bit of a strange size?
Soldato
What's the problem? There's plenty room on the floor!