steveritus Posted July 17, 2019 Posted July 17, 2019 I’m looking to purchase a server to replace the two which we currently have. We have one server: Xeon E5606 2.13Ghz 20GB, 200GB raid 5 This is our DC and runs AD. Our second server: Xeon E3-1220 V2 3.1GHz, 8gb. This is to run Capita SIMs There is nothing wrong with our current system except our DC is now about 8 years old. I’d need something powerful enough to run both servers on Hyper V. A company we got in recommended a Dell PowerEdge T440 - [Host Server] - Intel Xeon 4110 8C/16T CPU, 64GB RAM, 2 x 240GB M.2 Drives - RAID 1, 4 x 1.2TB 10k SAS Drives - RAID 5, Dual 750W PSU, iDrac9, 5yr Does this look about right? THanks
FN-GM Posted July 17, 2019 Posted July 17, 2019 The specs of your old servers seem the wrong way around. SIMS needs more grunt than a DC. What spec are you looking at for your new virtual machines?
strawberry Posted July 17, 2019 Posted July 17, 2019 Are these your only two servers? You don't have onsite file storage, print servers, DHCP, radius , backups, etc etc?. The Disks don't seem right. 10k disks in Raid 5 aren't that quick. Not for virtual machines and not for a DB intensive VM, unless your m.2 drives are intended for that in which case having your other storage on one array seems odd.
PotNoodleTech Posted July 18, 2019 Posted July 18, 2019 The spec on the new server appears fine for what you need - apart from the storage. If your buying a new server it really should be chocked full of SSD drives now as the performance gains are so huge. I only use mechanical drives for backup server use now.
XiJ Posted July 18, 2019 Posted July 18, 2019 I’d be tempted to go raid 10 on the mechanical drives. Depends how much storage you need. Primary or secondary. For our primary schools we’ll use ssd for VM’s (include sims DB) but mechanical for user data.
msi_school Posted July 18, 2019 Posted July 18, 2019 Just another comment about disks, try to stay away from RAID 5, it has a tendency to fall over on data recovery and it is very slow in comparison to RAID 1.
SuperChris1980 Posted July 18, 2019 Posted July 18, 2019 I can help you with this I'll run it past our server team and get some quotes across to you
johnlevis Posted July 18, 2019 Posted July 18, 2019 Hi @steveritus Happy to help with this but to be honest, probably worth a quick chat to go over details. Feel free to get in touch John Levis | Software and Solutions Specialist Tel: 0114 321 8609 [email protected] very-pc.co.uk
localzuk Posted July 18, 2019 Posted July 18, 2019 These days? SSDs are cheap. Though, not usually through the big names like Dell/HP. A Supermicro based machine from one of the smaller companies (VeryPC would probably be my go to) would be better value. We run Samsung PM863 2TB SSDs for our storage. Equivalent ones are £336 each now. So, I'd be scrapping those 10k drives, and slapping 4 of these in RAID 10 instead. 2
PotNoodleTech Posted July 18, 2019 Posted July 18, 2019 IMHO Better off using Raid5 for SSDs as there's far less write cycles on the parity to wear out your drives write endurance. (SSD's don't have the 48 hour rebuild penalty/danger that blights the 4 - 10 tb mechanical HDD)
msi_school Posted July 18, 2019 Posted July 18, 2019 Good points @AButters & @localzuk I am obviously a bit stuck in automatically thinking RAID 5 BAD I might be tempted to go with the RAID 5 or a RAID 1 rather than a RAID 10 because SSDs are so fast
ass17 Posted July 18, 2019 Posted July 18, 2019 Any type of RAID has its advantages and disadvantages but which ever you choose always remember RAID is not a substitute for backups. Always think about whether you can backup what you intend to run on the new server. But for what it’s worth, 6 or 10 for me.
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