Architecture of this server

[mirojr]

Hi,

 

Cant seem to find whether this is 64bit or 32bit.

 

HP ProLiant ML115 G5 Tower Server - Misco.co.uk

 

anyone help

 

thanks

[broc]

Not conclusive evidence but....

 

Processor is capable of 32 bit and 64 bit operation

 

Quad-Core AMD Opteron? Processor Key Features

 

HP Website includes driver support for 32 bit & 64 bit OS

[Duke]

It is, I think pretty much all AMDs have been 64-bit for a long time, far longer than Intel.

 

I have the same server and I'm using it for ESXi. 8GB RAM, boots off USB, 2x 1Gb NICs, SAN for storage, absolutely awesome for the price.

 

EDIT: If you want more proof: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Opteron_microprocessors#Opteron_1300-series_.22Budapest.22_.28B2.2C_B3.2C_65_nm.29 - AMD64.

 

Cheers,

Chris

[DMcCoy]

64bit, with AMD-V (along with bios support) allowing it to run 64 bit virtual machines. A number of us use them for ESXi testing machines (I just use one at home for an ESXi server).

[mirojr]

It is, I think pretty much all AMDs have been 64-bit for a long time, far longer than Intel.

 

I have the same server and I'm using it for ESXi. 8GB RAM, boots off USB, 2x 1Gb NICs, SAN for storage, absolutely awesome for the price.

 

EDIT: If you want more proof: List of AMD Opteron microprocessors - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - AMD64.

 

Cheers,

Chris

 

Hi. Thanks for that.

 

Hope you dont mind if i ask some questions like what OS do you use? Why boot off USB and not load ESX on to disk and also whats all this SAN storage business? Better than NAS?(not that i am familiar with that either)

 

I am very much a laggard

 

If i was to get this server i would get a ram upgrade but also am interested in hypervisor and storage options

 

Thanks

[glennda]

a san has better performance then a nas, but basicly they are the same thing, just they go around things in different ways, you can get different types e.g fiber channel and also Iscisi. I would say use ESXI as is cheap as chips (free!). he is probly booting from USB as has no hard disk in the actual server? theres not much point paying loads of money for a disk if only a few hundred meg is installed.

[mirojr]

So i guess this removes the issue of having to transfer data if you take the DC down with the data on and saves replication of data if i was to have to copy all data onto another DC to take one down.

[mirojr]

Expensive solutions though I see

[glennda]

expensive,

 

The nice thing about them tho, if you store you vmx files (virtual hard disks) if the esxi host dies, all you need to do is show the files to another ESXI host and just boot. reduces the downtime. altho don't think it works that simply from a Intel machine onto a AMD machine.

 

you could also just buy a NAS that has ISCISI and set it up that way. Just make sure you have a raid controller in the nas otherwise it is pointless has no redundency.

 

you could buy another server like you where looking at put lots of hard disks in and install freenas and use that as a Iscsi nas box.

 

Toby

[Duke]

Hope you dont mind if i ask some questions like what OS do you use? Why boot off USB and not load ESX on to disk and also whats all this SAN storage business? Better than NAS?(not that i am familiar with that either)

 

The OS directly on the server is VMware ESXi (bare metal install). The OS's of the virtual machines running on it are a mixture of Linux and Windows. That server with 8GB RAM is happily handling 5 VMs currently and will take a lot more as they're fairly low-usage.

 

Booting from USB because it was just a bit easier. I bought the bundle deal from ServersPlus which was that server with 4GB RAM (bought an extra 4GB) and a USB stick with ESXi already installed. I did a fresh install of ESXi anyway, but as ESXi does so few read/writes the USB stick will probably work out more reliable and easier to replace than the internal HDD. I can swap out a cloned replacement USB stick with no issues, whereas if I was using HDDs I'd probably want them mirrored in RAID1.

 

I said I'm using a SAN for storage, but as it's NFS it is more accurately NAS.

 

SAN = block-level (iSCSI)

NAS = file-level (CIFS, NFS)

 

I've got a Sun 7410 Unified Storage system which does iSCSI, CIFS, NFS, HTTP, FTP, etc. NFS is the most flexible and gives best performance with VMware in my experience using this hardware.

 

Having shared storage (be it iSCSI SAN or NFS NAS) isn't so much of an issue with ESXi as it runs as a standalone host (I'm talking about the free version of ESXi here), but eventually I'll have a pool of ESX servers using shared storage. In this way, if an ESX host fails another ESX host which has access to the same shared storage can automatically take over. If you're unfamiliar with the concept, Google 'VI3 Demo' and watch the old VMware video. It basically takes your downtime in the case of a server failure from a few days to about two minutes. With VMware Fault Tolerance you can get that down to less than a second of downtime (there's a couple of limitations).

 

As far as your 'expensive' comment goes, it depends. I was looking at £100k+ for a NetApp solution. My Sun box is the top-end model and came in at less than a third of the NetApp quote and is still bigger and more powerful. Sun, EMC, Dell, etc. all do cheaper solutions, and you could even build your own SAN/NAS using OpenFiler or FreeNAS for the same price as a decent PC.

 

Hope this helps,

Chris

[DMcCoy]

People boot from usb because when it was ESXi 3.5 it didn't support booting from the hard disk but did from USB (and had an internal connector).

[Duke]

People boot from usb because when it was ESXi 3.5 it didn't support booting from the hard disk but did from USB (and had an internal connector).

 

That too! Obviously ESX/ESXi needs to be able to see the local storage in order to install to it, and it doesn't have drivers for all onboard storage. vSphere 4.0 improved this a lot, but in quite a few cases USB storage was more likely to have drivers than the SATA controller.

 

Chris

[glennda]

HP at one point apparently where selling servers with ESXI installed on a chip on the motherboard!

[Duke]

Yeah, I'm not sure if VMware are still pushing the 'ESXi Embedded' product but I guess it has it's place. If you're buying dedicated VMware hosts, might as well keep things as simple as possible. If I was installing a huge ESX server farm then I'd rather not have to deal with failing HDDs or putting in USB sticks!

[mirojr]

So basically a NAS is a machine with 1 gig NIC in and 2 or more drives for RAID1?

 

Thats it?

 

All read/write is over the wire?

 

Thanks

[mirojr]

Whats best way to get it raided?

 

Do i just get a PCI raid card...i am thinking i will build one from in an older PC

[Duke]

So basically a NAS is a machine with 1 gig NIC in and 2 or more drives for RAID1?

 

Thats it?

 

All read/write is over the wire?

 

Imagine a Windows XP PC, share a folder on it and offer it over your network. That's essentially a NAS system. Do the same with a Linux server and an NFS share, same thing. SAN/iSCSI is somewhat more complicated.

 

A 'proper' NAS would be a storage box with redundant PSUs, multiple NICs (my 7410 has 4, some are for management, some for direct access from clients, some for the VMware hosts to access it), lots of HDDs in RAID5 or RAID6 with hot-spare drives. The RAID card would be a powerful one and able to make use of the system RAM, and the hardware may have SAS expanders to hang additional disk trays off the back. My 7410 will expand to 576TB with 2TB drives using additional disk trays.

 

The device itself will actually read/write the data from/to the disks and send it over the network. DAS (direct attached storage) is where the client would do the read/writes to the local storage.

 

As far as RAID goes, you have several options. Most decent motherboards have some kind of on-board RAID, but a dedicated PCIe RAID card with decent amounts of RAM, a good controller chip and a battery backup is ideal. It all depends on what you need this for, can you provide any more information on what your long term plans are? If you just want to have a play with SAN/NAS, Sun make a S7000 virtual machine simulator which is awesome.

 

Chris

[mirojr]

Well i need it to be better than our primary schools current setup which is all the data on the DC.

 

The DC has smart array raid5 hotswap drives

 

its a proliant dl385 g5

 

i feel i need the central storage

[glennda]

For a primary school you don't need to buy a really big one in terms of have more then 1/2 network cards if you are only planning for the VMware host to have access to it, i wouldn't recommend using an old pc for it tho, but i would say just build one in an old case, but new components as you don't want parts to fail, wouldn't need much ram then run freenas on it. would be alot cheaper if you want 1Tb plus get a couple of 1tb hard disks with the raid card and have them raid 10 (1+0) then it will mirror the data. I would suggest running two servers on the box so you don't have to have the DC as a file Server.

 

Toby

[mirojr]

ok.

 

I wasnt sure what you meant by running 2 servers on the box. On the NAS box?

 

I was going to get a new server for a second DC, keep the old one, and have a NAS box seperate.

 

For second server i was going to get a HP ProLiant ML115 G5 Tower Server

 

In opinion would i be better getting one of these as a NAS also OR having this do both NAS and second DC with hypervisor OR building NAS with my own parts?

 

The ML115 states only Raid 0,1,5 does this mean i can do 1+0 or not

 

Thankyou v much for input by the way

[Duke]

I wasnt sure what you meant by running 2 servers on the box. On the NAS box?

 

I was going to get a new server for a second DC, keep the old one, and have a NAS box seperate.

 

For second server i was going to get a HP ProLiant ML115 G5 Tower Server

 

In opinion would i be better getting one of these as a NAS also OR having this do both NAS and second DC with hypervisor OR building NAS with my own parts?

 

The ML115 states only Raid 0,1,5 does this mean i can do 1+0 or not

 

I think (please correct me if I'm wrong) Toby meant that if you're going to use VMware then make separate VMs for the file server and DC, rather than having one virtual server doing both roles.

 

Any idea what your budget is on this? You can do it all on the cheap, but to some degree you get what you pay for. Also, what are your current storage space requirements and estimated rate of growth? The ML115 doesn't make a great chassis if you need lots of HDD space.

 

Personally, if affordable, I would try something like:

 

• Keep one physical server as your primary DC. A Domain Controller can have other roles too with no issues (DCs themselves generally don't generate much load) but there are certain roles you shouldn't mix. Even in a virtual environment you should still always have one physical DC, but you can still utilise the hardware for other non-conflicting things.
   
  
• Use the other server as an ESXi host. You will need to check hardware compatibility and make sure it's got a decent amount of RAM (4GB minimum) but it doesn't need to be hugely powerful or expensive. 2 NICs (or 1 NIC with 2 ports) would be a bonus. You can use this to run 5-10 servers (very dependant on load and your requirements) for other things, development, testing, etc.
   
  
• Get a dedicated NAS box. Up to you if you build it yourself or buy one, but before making your own check out all the options from companies. The consumer-level hardware from companies like Buffalo and Iomega are pretty good these days. You've also got mid-level stuff from companies like JetStor and Dell to look at. Just bear in mind if it's storing critical user data and you built the NAS yourself, who gets blamed if it fails? At least if you buy a solution you have a warranty to fall back on. If set up correctly, your users can talk directly to the NAS so you don't actually need a dedicated Windows file server that in turn connects to the NAS.
  

 

As far as your RAID question goes, it generally won't do RAID 1+0 unless it specifically says so. Even if it does RAID0 and RAID1, RAID10 requires the RAID controller to be able to support nested RAID levels. Any particular reason for considering RAID10? Generally you'd only use this if you need the performance of RAID0 but with proper redundancy. RAID10 would normally be used for something like databases rather than file serving, and you lose half your storage space. Unless performance is a requirement, I'd suggest RAID5 (or RAID6 if you have the money and HDDs).

 

Cheers,

Chris

Edited February 24, 2010 by Duke

[glennda]

Thats what i ment, but by suggesting two 1tb hard disks is where i thort of the Raid1+0 as you only have 2 hard disks, raid 5 would be better if say buying 3 500gb hard disks, as you still have same amount of space as if u purchased 2 tb hard disks, but thinking about it now you are probly better off with 3 500gb hard disks and raid 5 as tbf the likelyhood of two disks going is the same for is you had 1tb hard disks, but this option will be alot cheaper. ie 3 500gb hard disks at raid 5, as i am assuming that 1tb is plenty plenty for a primary enless i am mistaken.

[glennda]

Just to make it clear, as its starting to get complicated.

The Suggestion is:

Get the New server (ml115) install ESXI onto the server.

Set up Nas Box (either custom made or Purchased) install 3 or 4 x 500gb hard disks at raid 5. - giving either 1tb or 1.5tb.

 

Keep you existing box as a DC, but i would say have this as a secondary dc so the roles are on the Virtual DC, then set up another VM as say a file server/application server.

 

Depending on the type of NAS you go for, if you purchased one it is more likely to be a 4 bay nas rather then a 3 bay.

 

Toby

 

Edit: http://e-weald.theweald.org.uk/diagram.jpg here is what i would suggest you make the network look like. enless you point the users directly at the nas.

Edited February 25, 2010 by glennda
Add Image

[Duke]

The Suggestion is:

Get the New server (ml115) install ESXI onto the server.

Set up Nas Box (either custom made or Purchased) install 3 or 4 x 500gb hard disks at raid 5. - giving either 1tb or 1.5tb.

 

Keep you existing box as a DC, but i would say have this as a secondary dc so the roles are on the Virtual DC, then set up another VM as say a file server/application server.

 

Depending on the type of NAS you go for, if you purchased one it is more likely to be a 4 bay nas rather then a 3 bay.

 

+1 on that. Using the ML115 for VMware makes sense as we know it'll work. What's the current server's spec? If it'll handle the DC role alone with no issues then what as Toby said it makes sense to keep it as the DC.

 

If you do go centralised storage SAN/NAS, try to plan ahead as much as possible for your storage requirements. It's better to have a box with empty drive spaces now knowing you can fill them later, than having to replace the whole unit and migrate your data in two years because you've run out of room and can't expand it.

 

Cheers,

Chris

[mirojr]

Yes its getting complicated for my newbie experience. ha.

 

ok i was wondering about this:

 

I think (please correct me if I'm wrong) Toby meant that if you're going to use VMware then make separate VMs for the file server and DC, rather than having one virtual server doing both roles.

 

Keep you existing box as a DC, but i would say have this as a secondary dc so the roles are on the Virtual DC, then set up another VM as say a file server/application server.

 

I thought the NAS would be the file server?