Build or buy a server for small business?

A

amarshonarbangla

Weaksauce
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Jan 4, 2013
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I was wondering if it would be better to build or buy a server. If it's better to buy, please recommend a few good pre-built servers. If it's better to buy, please recommend a good parts list.

It's mainly going to be a ESXi host with maybe 8 VMs, most of them running SQL Server. My budget is around $2500. Can you guys help me out?
 
You can find better deals on new or used OEM gear on eBay than you can build as far as the base server, especially if you factor in a warranty that's transferable. Upgrades to the base server you will want to do on your own.
 
Moved to Networking & Security: The guys here are more experienced in this kind of thing than General Hardware.

Also, don't build, buy due to the better support contracts.
 
2500 bucks for a vm server running 8vm's? What type of memory and i/o requirements are you going to have?

At that budget I'd say used dell or hp gear off ebay. Find some rack servers(they are generally cheaper than tower) that fit your needs and get the extra memory and sas drives you might need off there separately.
 
Personally I like to build and try to stay away from proprietary stuff that will be hard (or expensive) to find parts for 3 years down the line once the warranty is over and for the same money you can have more redundancy/spare parts instead. But most people tend to only go with commercial stuff for corporate political reasons such as the fact that if something goes wrong you have someone else to blame. Personally I always found that concept ridiculous, but it's also not false, if you build a server and it goes wrong you WILL get blamed for it. Companies just like to pass the blame somewhere and do not take "shit happens, let's just deal with it and move on" as an answer. They'll want full blown post mortems, reprimand or fire people etc.

Basically if this is a small business where there's not really politics like this, I'd build two servers or at least have common spare parts on hand. If you think you would get in lot of hot water over a failure, go commercial so you can cover your butt.
I'd be reluctant with ebay, you are basically getting the worse of both worlds. Proprietary stuff that may be hard to change parts if needed, and no warranty/support so you'll still be the one to blame if there's a failure. By the time you factor in shipping it's cheaper to build your own or go with low end commercial grade. Ebay shipping tends to be really expensive as people have to set a price that's high enough to componsate for worse case scenario like someone oversees buying it.

Dell servers are actually fairly decent in price if you want to go commercial. I've also been told you can put your own hard drives and ram in them, but not sure if that's the case, but you could do more research to see if that is the case then at least you can have the option of adding more ram/disk space in the future. When you buy commercial servers they tend to rape you on ram and disk space while the base model is not that bad in price.

If you do build, go with rackmount and hot swap drives... to me a tower with a bunch of internal drives is not a server, it's just a workstation with lot of disk space. :p You want hot swap drives and some kind of raid setup. Since you're using ESXi or other hypervisor you'll probably want hardware raid. At some point I'd look at building a dedicated storage server though.

Also don't forget backups, you'll want some kind of solution for that. Either backing up the VMs directly or data within the VMs.
 
Red Squirrel said:
Personally I like to build and try to stay away from proprietary stuff that will be hard (or expensive) to find parts for 3 years down the line once the warranty is over and for the same money you can have more redundancy/spare parts instead. But most people tend to only go with commercial stuff for corporate political reasons such as the fact that if something goes wrong you have someone else to blame. Personally I always found that concept ridiculous, but it's also not false, if you build a server and it goes wrong you WILL get blamed for it. Companies just like to pass the blame somewhere and do not take "shit happens, let's just deal with it and move on" as an answer. They'll want full blown post mortems, reprimand or fire people etc.
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Its all in the support. Most servers you can get 5 year warranties on and even then you can extend them in some cases. Have a problem with the firmware on the sas drives playing nice with the raid controler? Guess what the vendor gets to figure out why. I've had this happen before. When uptime gets more and more important hardware that has been tested together vs being pieced together starts to make a difference.

Last warranty claim I did was on an HP server where a drive failed and another failed as it rebuilt to a spare(server is like 3.5 years old). I called HP at a little after 5pm. The drives showed up around 7pm that night. Gotta love 4hr support contracts. This was the companies main hyper v box.

Mind you the above really doesn't fit in with his budget. Not sure how much of a load will be on those VMs but my budget for sas drives for an 8vm server would easily pass it.
 
Is it your own business? MAYBE build.
You are working for someone else? or have clients that use the server? Buy

The good thing about building is usually cheaper and you get exactly what you want.

The good thing about buying is that you get better support and warranty with one contact company instead of a dozen. and often you can extend warranties for a 'small' fee if you need to extend the life of the server
 
Red Squirrel said:
Personally I like to build and try to stay away from proprietary stuff that will be hard (or expensive) to find parts for 3 years down the line once the warranty is over and for the same money you can have more redundancy/spare parts instead. But most people tend to only go with commercial stuff for corporate political reasons such as the fact that if something goes wrong you have someone else to blame.
Click to expand...

There's no political reasoning in this. It's PRECISELY the reason you are recommending building. Do you really think that in 3-5 years some obscure Supermicro board or random desktop board will be easier to find than a known Dell/HP part that might actually be under next-day parts warranty or all over on ebay if need be? And how long would it take to find get, or will you double your cost by stocking spares? Building is knowing for certain what's in your desktop and/or desiging for a specific function, It's not about support and reliability in the future. Don't get me wrong, 15 years ago, I would have been right there with you. But now: "Ain't nobody got time for that! :D

For the OP, on that budget, I'd look at some off-lease kit on fleabay, and make sure you have good backups.
 
Are you doing this as an employee of the small business or as an outside IT contractor? It can make a big difference on YOUR taxes. Buying a bunch of parts with your money, assembling them and then reselling to the business could in the US, subject you to paying sales tax on the assembled machine plus income tax on the profit.

If you are in the role of contractor, configuring a machine on Dell or HPs website then giving the configuration to the purchasing officer of the business is generally the easiest. That way, you are out of the loop money wise on the machine and don't get hung for a $2000 bill if the business happens to go bust after you order but before you get paid.

How long is the business planning on keeping this machine? At some point, often only a couple of years, some parts for a custom built machine are no longer available and you will have to chance the 'recommended replacement' part. A production line server will often have a 5 year or longer parts availability if you keep the service contract in place. Plus service contracts have a 'guaranteed' response time.
 
ask yourself/your client how critical these machines are going to be for the business, and how many redundant machines and/or replacement parts you're going to be able to have on hand. after much debate at my company, we rolled dell. i look after a couple R620's and R720's. when i have a part go belly up, dell has someone on site with a replacement the same day. that piece of mind, to me, is (almost) priceless. granted, i don't pay the bills :p dell really isn't completely outrageous with pricing anyway though, plus your rep will more than likely offer you some sort of upgrade for free. i will say the iDRAC licensing now is rather asinine, but other than that.
 
Thanks for the suggestions everyone. It's for my own business. I won't be running 8VMs on that one server, I misworded. How would something like a HP ProLiant or Dell Poweredge fare in this sutiation?
 
A server is a server, is a server...

HP or DELL both make good servers, everyone is going to dislike one or the other for any amount of dumb reasons.

We resell DELL servers, I've had zero problem with them. If they break I get my parts quickly. I have lots of clients that have HP products, if they break we get the parts quickly. Both companies can get you parts next day.

My only problem with making your own is it can sometimes be a pain in the butt to get parts later on or this or that...... At least with an HP or a DELL there are probably a billion of them laying around. Not to say there wouldn't be parts for a 3rd party build. It's for yourself to, so I really don't think it matters much what you do, be it yourself, an HP, or DELL.
 
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I always liked Dell when it comes to commercial servers. I can't speak for HP as I never really dealt with them. The 4 hour support is one good perk of going commercial as mentioned, but you PAY for it, big time, but when you need it, it's nice to have. We had a card fail in our brand new Dell SAN. We knew it was 4 hour support but we figured that was probably just for the states and did not expect to see the part till next morning, since there's no way they're getting us a part right here, in 4 hours over 1000km away.. Somehow, they managed. This was at a hospital, we were joking that Dell must have paramedic helicopters and they just sent the part directly by chopper and landed here. Totally picturing a bunch of guys in paramedic suits with the Dell logo wheeling the part over on a crash cart lol.

The Dells are also ridiculously quiet and energy efficient. Even the 1Us are quiet. I don't want to sound like I'm trying to sell Dell though because I never played much with HP so they are worth a look too.

I still say Supermicro/custom is worth a look too so you get something a bit more custom (can use regular ram and regular hard drives for example) but if you want perks like 4 hour onsite support you can't really beat commercial grade like Dell and HP and your budget should allow to setup a decent box either way. I'd say support/warranty is probably your main deciding factor here. If this box is critical on it's own and is not just a node along an existing system, then I'd probably go commercial with 4 hour support. If it's 1 of multiple nodes and if it goes down it's not a huge deal and you can wait for spare parts to come in from an online retailer then go custom.
 
I buy,

I don't want the liability of hardware going down.

Never put yourself in a position where you have to take the blame! (Except in the rare instance you actually do screw something up lol.)

Buy OEM, buy support, make it their problem if it crashes.
 
i build, but only w/ top of the shelf supermicro stuff... unless it's something highly custom...

i like it because i get exactly what i need... i get frustrated with dell when they make you get a dual socket system because you want over 4 hard drive bays, and stupid stuff like that...

that said, i would most likely think differently depending on what kind of commercial application this was...


ask yourself how much money will be lost if this server is down for a given amount of time
 
It really depends on how much you care about the final product.

Building your own server/system can be fun, interesting and a very good way to learn. Downside is that availability and support is going to suffer when "shit hits he fan". As several mentioned, you're going to need to figure out all kinds of "fun" instability- and incompatibility issues on your own and don't expect vendor X to care even if you report it. If something breaks warranty service is going to take most likely weeks, is that acceptable? In most cases it's not going to be much cheaper.

Buying a branded/prebuilt server gives you official support and faster hardware replacement. Some vendors like Fujitsu pretty much uses stock server hardware which saves you a lot of time and headache. It might be a bit more expensive than building your own but its much more convenient if it fails and usually you don't want downtime at all. If anything addons can be a little pricey such as addition RAM or controller card but you can install these after purchasing the server if you want to save a few bucks.

So in short, get a server with stock components and you'll be fine and also thanking yourself in the end for doing so.
//Danne
 
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Honestly, I always buy OEM with support for something that is needed 24x7/365 in a mission critical role. If it is for tooling around or secondary duty, build.
 
For a gaming, machine, or a general purpose desktop, you can still build cheaper and/or better than you can buy. This is partially because high-end videocards and CPUs have a huge markup from Dell etc.

But, you can buy a decent server from Lenovo, HP, or Dell for just a few hundred $$. I'd go that way.
 
personal, build
business, OEM only

I would never build a server for a client, if I buy it I can blame the OEM if there are issues, if I build it it's on me... no thanks!!!
 
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