VM Host

[BinaryData]

Hey Ladies & Gents,

 

I wasn't sure if this was the proper section to post this in, my apologies if it isn't.

 

 

I'm looking to build a server to host a good chunk of media, i won't say specifically what, but videos (educational stuff), be a repository for my coding projects, and generic storage. It also has to be able to host 5 - 10 VM's at the same time.

I've never built servers before, I work in a Data Center, and the price of these servers made me poop my pants.

Any suggestions? I'd say a budget of $2,000 - $2,500.

 

 

Cheers!

 

- Zen

[+John Teacake MVC]

As daft as it sounds maybe you could rent some VPS servers, Have one for each of your projects.

 

There is a thread in the networking bit with recommended hosts.

 

Then you don't need to worry about hosting it. Just pay a company to do it.

[Intersect]

for around the prices you have given you could build from scratch a beefy VM Server

take a look at what this guy has done (https://tinkertry.com/vzilla) i know its out of your budget but it gives you an idea of what you will need for a good build.

[Skiver Veteran]

Moved to Virtualization & Cloud Services

[BinaryData]

Sorry Skiver! I totally didn't see this section.

 

@ John Teacake - Hmm... I've thought about that, but most of this is going to be for educational purposes. Plus, Windows Media Center wouldn't work with that, would it?

@ xSurgex - Very interesting. I'll read it more indepth, and go from there. I dislike VMware quite a bit, it seems to be a massive resource hog, even at my work we avoid VMWare if we can.

[Skiver Veteran]

Sorry Skiver! I totally didn't see this section.

@ John Teacake - Hmm... I've thought about that, but most of this is going to be for educational purposes. Plus, Windows Media Center wouldn't work with that, would it?

@ xSurgex - Very interesting. I'll read it more indepth, and go from there. I dislike VMware quite a bit, it seems to be a massive resource hog, even at my work we avoid VMWare if we can.

It's no problem, I moved it as it might draw in the experts you need as some won't go to the general sections.

Also just to add... free ESXi is ok but it comes with host limitsm, access to only 8 cores and 32GB of RAM etc, those might not be the exact numbers for 6 which is now out but it was something like that and the cost of a license to go above that is around

[guitmz]

VPS seems the way to go. You can get a 20GB SSD, 512MB RAM, 1TB transfer VPS for 5 USD at DigitalOcean (using this link you get 10USD in credits)

 

they also support a number of preinstalled apps for example you want a Wordpress VPS, they give you one already configured, etc

Edited March 25, 2015 by Brian M.
Removed referral link.

[kBWarrior]

You don't give specifics as to how much data you'll need, or what type of VMs they will be.

Regardless, I can tell you that $2500 for your own physical server that is capable of what you're trying to do is next to impossible.  Maybe you can try eBay.

 

You'd need to go VPS like guitmz suggests.  10 servers @ $10/month would get you roughly two years with your price point.

[Sikh]

You don't give specifics as to how much data you'll need, or what type of VMs they will be.

Regardless, I can tell you that $2500 for your own physical server that is capable of what you're trying to do is next to impossible. Maybe you can try eBay.

You'd need to go VPS like guitmz suggests. 10 servers @ $10/month would get you roughly two years with your price point.

Who said? You can build a machine for 2k and have it tun esxi fine. It won't be the normal idea of server but since is for a home project / server room why not?

[kBWarrior]

Who said? You can build a machine for 2k and have it tun esxi fine. It won't be the normal idea of server but since is for a home project / server room why not?

 

Yes, he can run ESXi on it...  But how will he run his 5 to 10 VMs?

 

/edit

Sikh... You have a point.  I just did a quick eBay search for a first gen Dell PowerEdge and it's not even 500 bucks with the following specs:

      SPECIFICATIONS Model Dell PowerEdge PowerEdge R610 MPN becwck1 Processor 2x Intel Quad Core 2.53GHz E5540 8MB 5.86GT/s Processor Memory Installed 24GB Total Memory; Twelve Slots Available: 12 x 2 GB DDR3 Memory Sticks Installed Hard Drives (Blanks and Empty Tray Caddies Not Included) Drive Bays 6 drive bays, blanks not included Riser Board (2) PCI-Express x8 Gen2 Slots External Media No Optical Drive Power Supply One Dell PowerEdge R610 High Output 717W Hot Plug Power Supply Backplane 6x 2.5" SAS/SATA Drive Bays (Blanks and Empty Tray Caddies Not Included) Ethernet Two Dual Port Embedded Broadcom NetXtreme ll 5709c Gigabit Ethernet NIC Video Intergrated Matrox G200, 8MB shared video memory Form Factor Rack-Mountable 1U RAID Controller Dell PowerEdge R610 Perc 6i RAID Controller Card Included Remote Access Card iDrac6 Remote Access Card Not Included Front Bezel Not Included - Available In Store Rapid Rails Not Included - Available In Store Operating System Windows 2008 Server Evaluation Edition Only Software Software Media or Licenses are not included COA Not Included Service Tag Several - Available Upon Request Return Policy/Warranty

14 days Money Back Or Exchange

 

I eat my words.  It is totally possible.

[binaryzero]

If you're going to buy a second hand server, at least replace the disks with freshies. 

[BinaryData]

Hmm. I'm glad I made this post, I've learned quite a bit so far. I suppose I should've given more specifics as to what OSs I would be running.

I'm looking at getting my MCSA and moving from an Operations Tech to a Linux System Admin position within the company. So, I'm primarily focused towards Linux, but wouldn't mind having my MCSA either. After reading everyones reactions to the 5 - 10 VMs, I've re-evaluated my thought plan. I think having 1 or 2 primary ones, i.e. RHEL and say OpenSUSE running all the time, and having the option to run a 3rd, if need be.


As for storage, I'm a bit of an archive nut. I download and keep a lot of revisions of software. I do download TV-Shows for my family, and that is one thing I would like to keep doing. But I won't speak of that any further. As for a second hand server, I'm a bit sketchy on second hand products. I've had my fair share, and a lot of them turned out to be bad investments. Buying brand new comes with a warranty if things go south. I'll keep in mind paying for a service like Digital Ocean, but I prefer to have control over as much as I can.

Like I stated above, I want to learn and absorb as much information as I can about Linux, the only experience I have with it, is through a beginners class. I'm currently building a new desktop, and after that I can start on the server. Gathering enough knowledge before I start looking is what I'm after. i.e. Hardware specifics.

[Sikh]

Ok so VMs especially Linux you can easily host 8-10 on a quad core machine with 16gbs of ram. With Linux being so light and each virtual machine never maxing out cpu you'll be fine.

The reason I say that is because I downgraded from a full server rack build dual quad core 32gb server to a quad core i7 Mac mini with 16gbs of ram. I'm hosting 7 Linux servers with 3 windows servers. The windows servers are the most demanding on ram and cpu and I'm barely doing anything with them. I'm just learning 2012 dc / fs / etc setup. Even with all this, my cpu is barely used.

So if your focusing primarily on CPU, you'll be fine. For a home lab you don't need absolutely killer hardware but if you want it, it's well in your budget. The Mac mini has 2 750gb 7200 Rpm drives and if I need faster / more storage I have a HP Gen 8 micro server I picked up cheap and have freenas running on it as a storage server. I have about 12T of usable space.

I wanted to comment on KBWarriors last post but quoting on mobile and trying to snip sucks.

Anyways I think your expecting way too much out of hardware.

[Praetor]

you can get a powerhorse Dell 2950 from ebay with lots of RAM and RAID controller for less than 2k and it would be in the VMware and Hyper-V HAL as well.

[binaryzero]

In my lab, I have a DC and File server (really just a box with some install files) always powered on, and then I just power up and down the VMs I need at the time. 

 

My box has 32gb memory.

 

Good luck on your MSCA.

[BinaryData]

Ok so VMs especially Linux you can easily host 8-10 on a quad core machine with 16gbs of ram. With Linux being so light and each virtual machine never maxing out cpu you'll be fine.

The reason I say that is because I downgraded from a full server rack build dual quad core 32gb server to a quad core i7 Mac mini with 16gbs of ram. I'm hosting 7 Linux servers with 3 windows servers. The windows servers are the most demanding on ram and cpu and I'm barely doing anything with them. I'm just learning 2012 dc / fs / etc setup. Even with all this, my cpu is barely used.

So if your focusing primarily on CPU, you'll be fine. For a home lab you don't need absolutely killer hardware but if you want it, it's well in your budget. The Mac mini has 2 750gb 7200 Rpm drives and if I need faster / more storage I have a HP Gen 8 micro server I picked up cheap and have freenas running on it as a storage server. I have about 12T of usable space.

I wanted to comment on KBWarriors last post but quoting on mobile and trying to snip sucks.

Anyways I think your expecting way too much out of hardware.

Hmm.. What do you mean by "expecting way too much out of hardware"? I guess my view is skewed on things. I look at what's used on these servers at work, and think "oh, i can downgrade specs and run this much". My goal is to find something I could use for learning purposes. I love to learn new things, and I'd love to become a savvy Linux person. If you read my introduction in that section, you'd know that I love to learn. (Not being sassy or anything).

 

you can get a powerhorse Dell 2950 from ebay with lots of RAM and RAID controller for less than 2k and it would be in the VMware and Hyper-V HAL as well.

Funny you mention Dell 2950, I work with several Dell guys. I'll ask them to drop off some documents about it.

 

In my lab, I have a DC and File server (really just a box with some install files) always powered on, and then I just power up and down the VMs I need at the time. 

 

My box has 32gb memory.

 

Good luck on your MSCA.

Hmm.. I was looking at getting a board with a minimum of 32GB. The board I want is 4x CPUs and max of 900GB-ish of RAM, but that's a want not a "need" kind of thing

Thanks, I'm pushing for my MCSA & my Linux+ Certs.

[binaryzero]

CBT Nuggets and Pluralsight are your friend for your exam prep. Also get the practice (real) exams for revision. 

 

I did my Server 2012 and private cloud certs last year.

[+BudMan MVC]

All comes down to what the VMs are actually doing, their load, etc..  You can run quite a few Vms on very little hardware to be honest..

 

This is an older hp N40L with 8GB of ram it and its running 7 vms all fine currently, normally I have 5 running all the time 24/7/365 but been playing with cacti and wmic, etc.

 

 

I am curios avoid vmware like the plague - so what are you running in this DC?  As to it being a resource hog?  I lost you..  Have never seen that.. 

 

To your budget, for a home project/lab to run some vms, etc. serve up some files - yeah it can be done a lot cheaper than that is for sure.  Are you counting storage in this budget?  How much if your wanting to put 4 1TB SSD in then - yeah your budget is blown   I have plenty of room for my vms on a 250GB SSD datastore.  But depends on what your going to be running, etc. 512 are getting reasonable priced that might be better option for datastore - but for actual storage of media, etc. HDD is best bang for the buck, etc.

[BinaryData]

CBT Nuggets and Pluralsight are your friend for your exam prep. Also get the practice (real) exams for revision. 

 

I did my Server 2012 and private cloud certs last year.

 

CBT Nuggets are a godsend. I've been watching the Kali Linux & BackTrack videos. My mind is blown at the level of information they give you. I hate to admit it, but I retrieved mine through other means, I can't quite afford what they're asking per month, and I didn't see any "educational/college" vouchers from them.

All comes down to what the VMs are actually doing, their load, etc..  You can run quite a few Vms on very little hardware to be honest..

 

This is an older hp N40L with 8GB of ram it and its running 7 vms all fine currently, normally I have 5 running all the time 24/7/365 but been playing with cacti and wmic, etc.

 

vms.png

 

I am curios avoid vmware like the plague - so what are you running in this DC?  As to it being a resource hog?  I lost you..  Have never seen that.. 

 

To your budget, for a home project/lab to run some vms, etc. serve up some files - yeah it can be done a lot cheaper than that is for sure.  Are you counting storage in this budget?  How much if your wanting to put 4 1TB SSD in then - yeah your budget is blown   I have plenty of room for my vms on a 250GB SSD datastore.  But depends on what your going to be running, etc. 512 are getting reasonable priced that might be better option for datastore - but for actual storage of media, etc. HDD is best bang for the buck, etc.

Well, I can't tell you anything about the DataCenter and what we run. I'd like to keep my level of security and job.   Storage isn't included in this budget, I currently have a few 1TB drives that are being unused, that I planned on popping in there. As for the VM's being resource hogs, I installed VMWare on my PC at home, loaded up a Ubuntu Server/RHEL 6.5 and I looked at my CPU/RAM consumption, and VMWare was eating 3GB of RAM for just one VM. I know my PC is old, but I used to handle 2 VMs at the same time, without any issues.

I'm not majorly familiar with servers, when people say standalones, I think of the 1U - 8U Cases, I deal very little with them. I'm not actually allowed to do any sort of Hardware changes, we call the company who produced the server, and they perform the tasks for us. But that is all I will say, work related. I was thinking of a Super Tower with a nice i7 or a dual quad core board with 32GB - 64GB of RAM, Dual SSD drives, and the rest of the slots be used for HDD Space but I'm new to this. I want to learn. My budget can be flexible, I say $2,000 - $2,500 because that's what I have available at this moment, but once I have one of my loans paid off, it'll jump to about a $5,000 - $8,000 budget (Not necessary, from what I've read so far).

Also, you guys are damn ninja's. I posted and you guys replied before I could even finish my rounds through the Data Hall. Haha. Sneaky beaky like!

[kBWarrior]

Hmm. I'm glad I made this post, I've learned quite a bit so far. I suppose I should've given more specifics as to what OSs I would be running.

I'm looking at getting my MCSA and moving from an Operations Tech to a Linux System Admin position within the company. So, I'm primarily focused towards Linux, but wouldn't mind having my MCSA either. After reading everyones reactions to the 5 - 10 VMs, I've re-evaluated my thought plan. I think having 1 or 2 primary ones, i.e. RHEL and say OpenSUSE running all the time, and having the option to run a 3rd, if need be.

As for storage, I'm a bit of an archive nut. I download and keep a lot of revisions of software. I do download TV-Shows for my family, and that is one thing I would like to keep doing. But I won't speak of that any further. As for a second hand server, I'm a bit sketchy on second hand products. I've had my fair share, and a lot of them turned out to be bad investments. Buying brand new comes with a warranty if things go south. I'll keep in mind paying for a service like Digital Ocean, but I prefer to have control over as much as I can.

Like I stated above, I want to learn and absorb as much information as I can about Linux, the only experience I have with it, is through a beginners class. I'm currently building a new desktop, and after that I can start on the server. Gathering enough knowledge before I start looking is what I'm after. i.e. Hardware specifics.

 

Your best bet is to just get a simple home type NAS/SAN, like the items SANSDIGITAL offers.  

Then buy a used server off eBay, and like someone said above, throw some fresh drives in.  This will give you beefy storage for your hobbies.

 

Especially if you're just interested in learning.  You need to determine your ROI after all.  So you want to learn Linux - Cool.  So you want your MCSA - Even better.  How much more will you earn with that per year over what you make now?  How much of an investment is that additional potential worth?

 

I am reminded of a quote - Every journey begins with the first step.

Don't sweat the idea of used hardware.  After all, this is for testing. Start small.  Build up.  You'll be happy that way, laying each brick in your learning foundation.  Shortcuts will get you only so far.  You can always ask one of your IT higher ups (Assuming you have some) if they have any old equipment you can use to learn on.  Then you'll be able to use your existing budget in other ways.

 

As for power behind running VMs.  I understand that people are saying it is possible to do within your budget, and it is.

But the problem you will run into (Especially with Windows VMs) is that they will be s-l-o-w.  You'll end up pulling your hair out wishing you got a more powerful host for your VM playground.

[Haggis Veteran]

I use ESXi on my little N54L HP Microserver

 

It currently does my plex media server and my pfsense firewall/router

 

It sits there perfectly using hardly any resources at all (i will post some screenshots later)

 

I also have 3 or 4 other vms i turn n and off when i want to have a play about, again unless i do something resource intensive its just sits there doing what its told

[BinaryData]

Your best bet is to just get a simple home type NAS/SAN, like the items SANSDIGITAL offers.  

Then buy a used server off eBay, and like someone said above, throw some fresh drives in.  This will give you beefy storage for your hobbies.

 

Especially if you're just interested in learning.  You need to determine your ROI after all.  So you want to learn Linux - Cool.  So you want your MCSA - Even better.  How much more will you earn with that per year over what you make now?  How much of an investment is that additional potential worth?

 

I am reminded of a quote - Every journey begins with the first step.

Don't sweat the idea of used hardware.  After all, this is for testing. Start small.  Build up.  You'll be happy that way, laying each brick in your learning foundation.  Shortcuts will get you only so far.  You can always ask one of your IT higher ups (Assuming you have some) if they have any old equipment you can use to learn on.  Then you'll be able to use your existing budget in other ways.

 

As for power behind running VMs.  I understand that people are saying it is possible to do within your budget, and it is.

But the problem you will run into (Especially with Windows VMs) is that they will be s-l-o-w.  You'll end up pulling your hair out wishing you got a more powerful host for your VM playground.

I feel slightly, "stupid", but what does "ROI" stand for?

I currently make 42k / year, but after taxes it's about 38k / year. My situation, is more humiliating, than anything else. I applied for a position in Pittsburg, PA, if I got the job, I'd be making nearly double what I am now.

As for old equipment, ours is shredded. Since we have Government contracts, we destroy drives by warping the plates or something of that nature.

Also, is this what you're referring too? (Sans Digital)

[kBWarrior]

I feel slightly, "stupid", but what does "ROI" stand for?

I currently make 42k / year, but after taxes it's about 38k / year. My situation, is more humiliating, than anything else. I applied for a position in Pittsburg, PA, if I got the job, I'd be making nearly double what I am now.

As for old equipment, ours is shredded. Since we have Government contracts, we destroy drives by warping the plates or something of that nature.

Also, is this what you're referring too? (Sans Digital)

 

 

 

ROI is Return on Investment - http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/returnoninvestment.asp.  

So if you have a potential for doubling your salary, that is fantastic.  I would definitely consider investing in your future, 2.5k is a drop in the bucket compared to your potential future earnings.

 

Definitely look into the eBay / Craigslist route for used equipment.  Your best bet.

I learned to drive with a car that didn't have power steering.  Parallel parking was abhorrent, but I did it.  Then, when I got power steering, I was just so overwhelmed by how awesome it was.

 

That is a similar situation to what you are in, I feel.  You're going to get equipment that will run what you need to learn, but it will definitely not be ideal.

 

Also, yes, that Sans Digital link is one of them.  There are many types, just pick the one that best suites your needs.

[+BudMan MVC]

and what did you allocated to that 1 server using up 3GB.. Was it in the process of doing something? What does it matter how much ram was "used"  It is amazing the complete lack of understanding on ram..  To be honest unused ram is wasted ram.. Now if the ram is loaded with junk and you want new stuff in and you have to swap that out then that is a problem.  But you need to understand what is managing the ram, etc.

 

So here is screenshot of my old N40L esxi host.. As you can see with 7 vms running its not taxing the cpu of the host..  As to memory used - the one you would be concerned with was swap or actively used depending on what you were doing.

 

 

So you can not tell us Visualization software your running that is not a hog??  Or you could loose your job?  BS.. Sorry plain and simple, nobody knows where you work, or what your real name is even.  How is saying you run XYZ for your visualization software have anything to do with anything??  Didn't ask you who you customers are, or what your actually doing.  I asked if you feel that vmware is a hog, what are you running in its place.  Didn't even ask you what its hosting, etc.

 

I can tell you we use esxi 5, which just a shame why they are so far behind, and also use hyper-v, 2008, again so far behind.

 

I have been using vmware products since vmware server version 1..  And I have never recalled thinking it is using too many resources that should be available to the guests, etc.

[guitmz]

well i recommended vps because of the low cost (a 24/7 machine may add a lot to the energy bill in some contries) but yeah you can get a used server to save money, is perfectly fine to do so