Hello, guys and gals. This is my first post here, but I was semi-active on the previous forum (tek) as well as a fateful worshipper of Wendel and his infinite knowledge for quite some time now.
Straight to the point - In the company in which I work, we've made the decision to move the core members from laptops to stationary workstations x15 (only keyboard, mouse and monitor+access point) and a server so each user can sit anywhere when he gets to work and visualize his desktop environment by logging with his user.
We got most of the configurations figured out but we were wondering about the hardware side of things and this is what we thought might work: R430 Chassis CPU: 2x Xeon Processor E5-2609v3 (1.90 GHz, 15 MB, S2011-3) RAM: Kingston ValueRAM 4x16 GB Modules 1600MHz DDR3 ECC Reg CL11 DIMM SSD: 2x Samsung SM863 Series 960GB (2-bit V-NAND) Power Supply: PowerEdge 550W
The main workload will be MTPuTTY and WHMCS(browser)
Could you give me some feedback on this being sustainable for 15 employees as well as recommendations on the access point. It will be much appreciated.
So there are a couple issues with the specs you've put out. The R430 chassis supports those cpus, being that the R430 chassis supports socket 2011-v3 xeons. Okay, good. But, the memory needs to be DDR4 Registered, and you've got DDR3 Registered, so that won't work. I would also recommend you bump the Xeon models up to something like the 2620 v4. The 2609 v3 doesn't have hyperthreading, and the 2620 v4 does. The price delta isn't that large, but the thread count of the 2620 v4 is almost 3x the thread count of the 2609 v3.
Thank you TheCaveman! Will make sure to bump those to at least 2620 v4 and fix the RAM match. Any thoughts on the access point? The 15 people will be split to 2 groups - 7 and 8 respectively so will need 2 of those at least.
Only 64GB RAM? How few users do you have? I'd provision 16GB per user.
Bump up to the R630, 24 RAM slots.
Or if you are strapped for budget, R620 systems with dual socket 8core (16cores total), 128GB RAM and enterprise SSD's approximating your config can be had for around $1500. (I've been specing them myself lately). The biggest difference is the CPU generation and DDR3 instead of DDR4.
We can bump it to 128GB, however considering the low load per user we found that they cap at ~4-4.5GB RAM on their laptops - 64Gb seemed like a good choice. I am not sure how much RAM the visualization itself will eat tbh so a buffer might be useful.
Ubiquiti is the way to go right now. I would suggest the AC PRO model, as it has a 3x3 attena configuration and I believe it will do seemless hand-off between units. I use the Lite version at home and its an absolute tank of a unit. Cannot say enough good things about them.
Ubiquiti is a solid choice indeed, but I didn't see HDMI port on that one Caveman and we will need to connect a monitor, keyboard and mouse to each of those. This is the part that concerns me.
I guess I didn't explain it clearly enough. We want them to be able to use a monitor and peripherals without actually having to buy them separate computers but instead use the resources of the server. So something like a KVM switch but in reverse.
Btw I was looking at some Intel NUC devices that have the necessary ports but they didn't have PoE which meant more cables which is something we want to avoid.