Hi guys. Just looking for some feedback.
The cybersecurity organisation at my university is looking to setup a new practice lab for doing things like attacking and defending systems, malware analysis, reverse engineering, etc. Our budget is around $7000-$8000 and we're looking for a setup that would allow 10-15 concurrent users to deploy 20-30 virtual machines. We figure a 20+ thread zeon and 256GB of ram will be enough, but our biggest issue is with Disk I/O. I've tried handrolling some solutions in the past with KVM, but once we got 6-8 people configuring their systems at the same time, everything crawled to a halt. This system will likely be running ESXi, vSphere, and VMWare Horizon.
What suggestions do you have for us to get the most bang for our buck? What should we be looking at in terms of storage to make sure that multiple concurrent users don't bog the thing down?
Edit: What we're currently looking at
A blade system with internal hdds/ssds or external Storage enclosure. You could have up to 16 different machines each with their own hard drive to speed things up. I dont know aboht prices new, but they come quite cheap on the used market.
Looking for a setup that is preferably new so that the warranty is still good. Wouldn't want to dump a few thousand into a system only for it to shit the bed a few months down the road.
In terms of what I know, it looks fine. However, to address your I/O problem I would go for 4 SSDs in Raid 10 for a mix of speed and data safety. Two things commonly die on servers: power supplies and hard drives. I don't know how much you want to rely on Dell warranty or how long the project will last, but consider hot swap and maybe redundant PSUs.
I would go with Dell, their support tends to be better than HP. You could go Supermicro if you're okay with a self build.
I have a dell R715 with 32 cores and 24 GB of RAM. Storage is my biggest bottleneck, I would definitely go with the fastest storage you can get. Even with such a small amount of RAM, most OSes don't take up a whole lot running, but more is always better, room to expand.
On a final note, look for university discounts. These come primarily in software, but some companies do give some hardware discounts as well. Not to sway your choices either, but you can find used servers for quite cheap that still have active warranties
