[K12OSN] Server choices

[pogson]

Michael Blinn <mblinn at peopleplaces.org> wrote:


>   I'm nearing the purchase point of my terminal server, but I thought 
> before laying down the serious $$, I should get the opinions of those 
> who have been there before!


I have just been through that. I was looking at building two dual - dual
core Opteron 165 systems for about $7000 including 16 gB RAM. I decided
that I could get more bang for the buck by using different
configurations for the terminal servers and the web/dhcp/mysql/nfs
server. What I came up with was:

      * four AMD64 X2 3800 systems for terminal servers with four 40 gB
        drives in RAID1 and 4 gB RAM each
      * two AMD64 X2 3800 systems for web/dhcp/mysql/nfs on /home
        and /var with four 320gB drives and 2gB RAM each in a fail-over
        cluster

which costs about the same, except I get 16 heads on / for the terminal
server  and I get two extra chips working as separate servers. I get
more horsepower overall except I have smaller caches. I should be able
to run with one terminal server and one web server down, not that I
expect that ever. I expect my LAMP stack to get a lot of work from about
one third of my clients, so I thought this was better, separating
terminal service from web/nfs/db. I believe I made the right decision
even though the parts are still in transit, especially when the AMD cuts
came in... The cut to AMD64 X2 3800 was close to 50%, and he threw in
free freight... I will have 150 PXE thin clients usually with 50 old
Windows machines useing web service, until they find out how much fun
3800 is compared to 400 ;-) when I expect to have 200 PXE clients. 30
clients were happy on my AMD64 3000 single core with 2gB, so I figure 50
will be happy with 3800 X2 with 4gB, especially when the PHP scripts
aren't loading things down. I have Wikipedia, Moodle, phpBB, etc.,
available. With all the redundant storage and multiple heads, I doubt
this system will get bogged down.
-- 
A problem is an opportunity.
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