Hello guys, I am putting together a small business and I am looking into building a server myself to do mostly everything and I would like your help, questions at the end. Here are the details:
a. Number of maximum workstations/users: 10 b. Required server functionality: a. NAS b. Virtual Machines c. Network Video Surveillance d. ERP software (Odoo) e. Jira project management f. Asterisk VoIP g. Workstation Backups
After looking into it I am thinking about the following components: 1. Motherboard: SUPERMICRO MBD-X10DAI-O Extended ATX Xeon Server Motherboard Dual LGA 2011-3 Intel C612 2. CPUs: 2x Intel Xeon E5 2630 V4 ES 2.2Ghz 25MB L3 10 Core Max Turbo 3.1Ghz 85W Broadwell-E 3. RAM: Kingston ValueRAM 128GB (4 x 32GB) DDR4 2400 RAM (Server Memory) ECC Reg DIMM (288-Pin) KVR24R17D4K4/128I (Intel Validated)
I would like help with the following: 1. Let me know if you think that the project should be done using different machines and how. 2. Chassis and redundant PSUs. Should it use 2.5” or 3.5” drives? 3. HDDs: I would go with NAS grade drives but since some of the system will be allocated to video surveillance should I get purple or does it not matter since NAS drives are also ok for that. 4. Cards: What additional cards will I need? NICs, RAID etc? 5. Is there anything else I am missing?
Thank you in advance. Just note that I am tech savvy and I have put many home networks, computers etc. together so putting the whole thing together should not be a problem.
You might want to consider mixing some SSD's in with your HDD's so you can either create drive pools with caching or just give some VM's virtual disks that are hosted on SSD's.
There was a thread on here recently about buying consumer USB drives, it turns out some of them were using the better quality NAS HDD's in them and were being sold at a price less than when you just buy the drive. That might be worth checking. With regard to RAID cards they are probably not needed if you are using a file-system like ZFS in BSD/Linux or ReFS and StoragePools in Windows. That mobo has 10 x SATA 3 connectors, so you should be good to start off with.
Which hyper-visor are you planning to go with? What OS will the majority of your VM's run? I would do all the tasks you listed inside VM's that way you can easily scale the resources available to the different tasks and use VM snapshots as well as regular backups to help you recover from any problems.
Having 1 machine do all of that is suicide because if anything happens to that machine, then you loose out on all of that functionality.
I would make a single storage server for your NAS and backups. I think a 6 core processor with 32GB of ram should work well enough.
Video surveillance should be it's own box. IDK how many cameras there are and what sort of security you really require, so I will let you make the call on that one. But in no way should it be connected to the rest of the network.
Virtual machines should have their own box as well, and I would probably go with a 12 core cpu and 64GB of ram. That way everyone could have 1 core and 2 threads with 4+ GB of ram.
Finally you can make another box that would handle your ERP, Voip, and jira.
I think this is would GREATLY reduce the impact of down time.
In a business environment, agree with @Tjj226_Angel. Unless you are running an HA cluster, one physical machine that handles it all is -- fucking frightening. Even with HA, I would totally separate that video surveillance machine.
NAS can be its own entity, CAN be a VM -- need backups!
VM's -- what other VM's are you looking to get on there? Is the ERP software tied to Windows? If it is a Windows Environment, are you looking to get a domain going?
Video Surveillance should be on it's own machine, in my opinion -- VLAN
VOIP -- is it just a controller app? I am not very familiar with Asterisk, so I am not sure which hardware is involved on top of a controller.
Look into backup appliances (or even Synology image backups), definitely look into potential offsite replication if you have the money.
If this is a Windows environment, then also have to take CAL's into consideration if you want to run a pretty Domain Controller and perform DHCP on that. Licensing sucks
Backup the workstations? Dude back up the infrastructure first. Make everyone save their stuff on the NAS - with RAID.
Build a SAN for backup infrastructure. Centralize backups to write to storage array pool isci style. Keep the data on disk for 2 weeks and then ship it to S3 or glacier for a year for retention.
Daily incrementals and weekly fulls.
Maybe even get thin clients, and push the images to the 10 machines. No local HDD cuts down on tech support and recovery since they'll have to save to the NAS. A failed HDD will jack up at least a good portion of An IT memebers day - reimage - data recovery - redeploy, plus the worker is OOS. A dead hdd on raid 50. Meh, just get the new one out ASAP. Shouldn't affect operations.
VM Infrastructure for what? How many VMs?
PS don't forget the UPS. Get one that can handle the load and enough juice to ensure you can get your stuff down.
