Spec for Hospital Radio Servers

[THERADIOTUBBY]

Hi Guys

 

I volunteer as the station engineer at a hospital radio station.

We have just had donated a couple of HP DL360 G6 rack servers each with 32Gb of Ram and Dual Xeon E5504 processors.

Servers will hopefully replace aging Dell 2850’s each of which has a separate role however donations came without drives (or OS) so looking at making best use of them with our limited budget as we are a charity.

Initial idea was to install windows 10 which we have full enterprise licenses for (drivers appear to be available) then go Hyper-V installing say three VMs on each host – we do not need a full Domain, DHCP, DNS etc

Roles include file server (for Mp3s), SQL server for playout system, Shoutcast server, Recording server, Web Server, Server running our 24 hour software etc – all of which are not particularly processor or memory intensive.

 

So what about the drives?

 

One small Raid for the host OS and a larger one for the VMs?

Is the redundancy of RAID worth it? If I backup the VMs regularly?

SAS drives or SATA?

Any point in SSD?

What capacity? – our music library is around 400Gb

Any suggestions much appreciated

 

Thanks in advance

[Norphy]

What OS are the VMs going to run? You don’t need Windows 10 Enterprise if all you’re going to do is run Linux or another non-Windows OS in a VM, any free hypervisor including ESXi or the free version of HyperV Server will do the trick

 

Regarding storage

 

 

RAID is not a backup. RAID is about resiliency and uptime: should a disk fail, it won’t kill your service. Yes, you could restore from backup if a non-RAID disk failed but your service would be down from the time that the disk failed until you restored that backup. That could be a long time and you would lose any new data generated since the last backup run.

 

Go SSD if you can afford it, especially if you’re running databases. There’s also no reason why you couldn’t get both and run some kind of storage tiering

 

SAS vs SATA: there are features on SAS which aren’t in SATA but at the level we’re talking about, I don’t think they’re that important. The main advantage of SAS is its throughput, especially with SSDs but that might not come into part of your services aren’t heavy on the storage. SAS drives are usually enterprise level as well; they would have been certified for server workloads and have warranties to match. SATA drives, not so much.

 

Amount of storage? I’d say at least 2TB. That’d cover your 400gb of data, the OS overhead and give you a bit of room to expand.

 

One big RAID volume vs one for OS and one for data? I think that will depend entirety on the disks you end up choosing.

Edited August 9, 2020 by Norphy

[computer_expert]

With a server that old you'll probably have to run the free hyper-v server or some form of linux based hypervisor. I think the latest version of ESXi you can officially install is 5.5 (now end of life). V6 (also end of life) may work but you may have to perform a few workarounds. V6.5 or v6.7 added a warning that blocks unsupported CPUs and you'll have to find more workarounds.

 

Hyper V server 2019 (CLI only, no GUI): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-server-2019

If you wish to use a windows guest VM with the free hyperv server above, you'll need to ensure the windows guest is properly licenced. Any linux VMs don't need a licence though.