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- Joined
- May 18, 1997
- Messages
- 58,070
We have been getting lined up to retire some older equipment that has started to show signs of aging. We have web servers that are 5 years old now. We were all-AMD for a number of years, but this new build-out moves us to all-Intel for production boxes.
HardOCP's Primary Database is on a private network and is not seen by you guys. This is where we do all of our work and carry out all of our admin and content management system duties. When we publish an article, it is pushed out to the DB Load 1 & 2 servers; these actually do not really feel much stress due to caching systems that are in place. The 4 webservers carry the load. Everything you see here is way overbuilt for the current need, so this should see us through for a good while.
HardForum's Database servers have different jobs. The Primary takes care of all your reads and writes, and the Secondary handles your searches. (A bit more to it than that, keeping the story short.) The webservers are what you guys beat on. This is not too terrifically overbuilt, but somewhat. This setup should allow us to easily realize 3000 simultaneous users 24/7 should it come to that.
Since VMWare's ESXi is now FREE! The software to use it still costs, but the per machine licenses are now gone. We are going to be moving to virtualizing our 8 webservers and hopefully moving to an application to load balance the virtual web servers.
Some of you have been asking, so there you go. Hopefully this hardware setup should be fully functional in 30 days. The HardForum will see a very small window of downtime while HardOCP will likely be offline for a 5 or 6 hours. All work should happen on late weekend nights. This all represents about $25,000 in upgrades. Amazingly enough, the first two servers I bought in 1990 and 2000 were dual Pentium CPUs with a Gigabyte of RAM and a healthy 5 drive array, and those boxes were $12,000 and $13,000 each. Amazing how much further your money goes now days.
HardOCP's Primary Database is on a private network and is not seen by you guys. This is where we do all of our work and carry out all of our admin and content management system duties. When we publish an article, it is pushed out to the DB Load 1 & 2 servers; these actually do not really feel much stress due to caching systems that are in place. The 4 webservers carry the load. Everything you see here is way overbuilt for the current need, so this should see us through for a good while.
HardForum's Database servers have different jobs. The Primary takes care of all your reads and writes, and the Secondary handles your searches. (A bit more to it than that, keeping the story short.) The webservers are what you guys beat on. This is not too terrifically overbuilt, but somewhat. This setup should allow us to easily realize 3000 simultaneous users 24/7 should it come to that.
Since VMWare's ESXi is now FREE! The software to use it still costs, but the per machine licenses are now gone. We are going to be moving to virtualizing our 8 webservers and hopefully moving to an application to load balance the virtual web servers.
Some of you have been asking, so there you go. Hopefully this hardware setup should be fully functional in 30 days. The HardForum will see a very small window of downtime while HardOCP will likely be offline for a 5 or 6 hours. All work should happen on late weekend nights. This all represents about $25,000 in upgrades. Amazingly enough, the first two servers I bought in 1990 and 2000 were dual Pentium CPUs with a Gigabyte of RAM and a healthy 5 drive array, and those boxes were $12,000 and $13,000 each. Amazing how much further your money goes now days.
