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Preparing to build a server.....

M

Moose777

2[H]4U
Joined
Oct 10, 2004
Messages
2,741
I've got 2 server cases coming, one from Newegg and the other from a local store here in town.

I want to build a server in one. I've already got Win 2k3 Server Software so I don't need software so, what I want to know is what kinds of components am I looking at here?

I'm probably going to use it to start an automotive forum and possibly my own business so any information you guys can give will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks a lot. :)
 
I'm not too worried about money because it's somethign I'm going to build over time.

As for processors, I'm not really sure, what would be my best bet?
 
Id go with the Opteron processors. They are pretty good in server environments.
 
If you want an excellent, stable server mobo, i'd going with a tyan thunder k8w or the k8we when it comes out. Tyan boards are rock solid stable server boards. Plus as it's server you might end up adding high end scsi raid cards, which come in pci-x ( yes they might move to pci-e but that will just drive pci-x cards cheaper!)

If you really wanted high end, you could work with the tyan quad opteron board, no agp, but as it's a server, that shouldn't be an issue.
 
Thanks for the info guys. I'm writing down all these board name and numbers so that I have them handy when I start putting it together, hopefully my cases come in tomorrow like they are supposed to.
 
IMO, Tyan has amazing mobos. Also look at Iwill. For HD, id hit on any SCSI or SATA. Seagate makes pretty good SCSI drives and Western Digital makes good SATA drives. For the OS, id go with a SCSI driver (for speed) and for storage, go for a SATA.
 
not for a web server. For a web server, if anything use the single-tasked 7K SATA/PATA drives for OS/Backup, and a SCSI or Raptor (preferably RAID 1 or 5 array, but single drive can suffice) for the serving, as it's going to get hit by many more simultaneous requests than te PC on your desktop. IDE RAID (in my opinion) is NOT useful for any real servers. Use it at your house, even for your home server, but businesses need the increased reliability, throughput, latency, and random I/O performance of a Raptor or SCSI drive. Raptors are basically SCSI drives on a SATA bus.

For CPUs, I'd get a single Opteron on a dual board, and if you need any sort of major horsepower for a database server or somesuch (like a furum DB) you can put in the second, matched CPU, assign it all the DB processing, and you still have a blazingly fast server using the other CPU for all your daily server tasks.

For RAM, get 1GB sticks. You need the extra room to breathe. I'd start with 2, on the first CPU. (remember, some boards require RAM for each CPU, so the second CPU would need *I think* 2 more 1GB sticks of RAM)

For Hard drives, I would say RAID 1 or 5. RAID 1 is easier to manage, and I'd say do that to start, because a RAID5 array is kinda a gamble without hotspares. Adaptec is my favorite, and they've served me well. Others such as 3Ware are probably just as good, but I've always stuck with Adaptec. SCSI is recommended, but a good hardware controller with Raptor drives will be nearly as good for alot less.

For your OS, USE OPENBSD! You have hardened Apache (and SSH) with the default install, and it's tough as nails for security. And it's infinitey cheaper than MS (free!) You can add many other apps through the ports tree as well, but they're not guaranteed to be secure like the base install.

At the least, build a cheap ($1000 or less, I'd say) OpenBSD firewall, to protect your server if you'll be running another OS. (esp. Windows :p)
 
Tha_Bomb said:
not for a web server. For a web server, if anything use the single-tasked 7K SATA/PATA drives for OS/Backup, and a SCSI or Raptor (preferably RAID 1 or 5 array, but single drive can suffice) for the serving, as it's going to get hit by many more simultaneous requests than te PC on your desktop. IDE RAID (in my opinion) is NOT useful for any real servers. Use it at your house, even for your home server, but businesses need the increased reliability, throughput, latency, and random I/O performance of a Raptor or SCSI drive. Raptors are basically SCSI drives on a SATA bus.

For CPUs, I'd get a single Opteron on a dual board, and if you need any sort of major horsepower for a database server or somesuch (like a furum DB) you can put in the second, matched CPU, assign it all the DB processing, and you still have a blazingly fast server using the other CPU for all your daily server tasks.

For RAM, get 1GB sticks. You need the extra room to breathe. I'd start with 2, on the first CPU. (remember, some boards require RAM for each CPU, so the second CPU would need *I think* 2 more 1GB sticks of RAM)

For Hard drives, I would say RAID 1 or 5. RAID 1 is easier to manage, and I'd say do that to start, because a RAID5 array is kinda a gamble without hotspares. Adaptec is my favorite, and they've served me well. Others such as 3Ware are probably just as good, but I've always stuck with Adaptec. SCSI is recommended, but a good hardware controller with Raptor drives will be nearly as good for alot less.

For your OS, USE OPENBSD! You have hardened Apache (and SSH) with the default install, and it's tough as nails for security. And it's infinitey cheaper than MS (free!) You can add many other apps through the ports tree as well, but they're not guaranteed to be secure like the base install.

At the least, build a cheap ($1000 or less, I'd say) OpenBSD firewall, to protect your server if you'll be running another OS. (esp. Windows :p)
Click to expand...
Damn, now that was informative!!
:D Thanks a lot man. I've got all this saved to my notepad.
 
Tha_Bomb said:
For RAM, get 1GB sticks. You need the extra room to breathe. I'd start with 2, on the first CPU. (remember, some boards require RAM for each CPU, so the second CPU would need *I think* 2 more 1GB sticks of RAM)
Click to expand...

I know with the tyan k8 line (s2875 speciffically) you can install memory in 1/2/4 modules per cpu, and it is reccomended you install the memory symetrically. I've been told you get the best preformance by running 4 identical dimms in the k8w (give you 2 dual chanell memory banks, one per cpu)
 
Frosty_axe said:
I know with the tyan k8 line (s2875 speciffically) you can install memory in 1/2/4 modules per cpu, and it is reccomended you install the memory symetrically. I've been told you get the best preformance by running 4 identical dimms in the k8w (give you 2 dual chanell memory banks, one per cpu)
Click to expand...

Is that really the way that motherboard works? Looking at the S2875 datasheet, it seems like the 2nd processor accesses memory only through the first processor's hypertransport channel.

If research a board like the S2885, the datasheet shows that each processor has its own channel to half of the memory sockets.

.B ekiM
 
mikeblas said:
Is that really the way that motherboard works? Looking at the S2875 datasheet, it seems like the 2nd processor accesses memory only through the first processor's hypertransport channel.

If research a board like the S2885, the datasheet shows that each processor has its own channel to half of the memory sockets.

.B ekiM
Click to expand...

on the s2885, each processor does have direct access to 4 memory slots. However the processor can also access the memory over the hypertransport bus. When I first set up the sysem in my sig I had some memory issues, and only ran wiht one pair for about a week. I can confirm that the system did run fine with 1 and 2 dimms in the cpu - 0 bank, and it is now running 2 dimms in each bank.
 
Frosty_axe said:
on the s2885, each processor does have direct access to 4 memory slots. However the processor can also access the memory over the hypertransport bus. When I first set up the sysem in my sig I had some memory issues, and only ran wiht one pair for about a week. I can confirm that the system did run fine with 1 and 2 dimms in the cpu - 0 bank, and it is now running 2 dimms in each bank.
Click to expand...


What' he's sayig though is that because the s2875 has only one set of memory banks, all memory requests for either process must go through the hypertransport and cpu0.
 
defakto said:
What' he's sayig though is that because the s2875 has only one set of memory banks, all memory requests for either process must go through the hypertransport and cpu0.
Click to expand...

Your right.. that first post by me that he quoted was a typo on my part. I did mean the 2885. The 2875 does in fact have one memory bank for both prosessors (or single processor in the case of the 2875s, ive got one of those too)
 
Doesn't this scheme make these machines NUMA?

If CPU1 has to go through CPU0 to get at some physical memory, won't it be paying a penalty in access time and latency?

.B ekiM
 
mikeblas said:
Doesn't this scheme make these machines NUMA?

If CPU1 has to go through CPU0 to get at some physical memory, won't it be paying a penalty in access time and latency?

.B ekiM
Click to expand...

Yeah, the s2885 (the one with 2 memory banks) is a numa supported motherbord. Both processors have their own ram bank, and can still acccess the other processors memory.

I'd imagagine that there is a little more latency when one cpu has to talk thru the other cpu to gain memory access. But with the memory controllers on die, i'd wager that the added latency is very very little.
 
This is all very informative, I've learned quite a bit. Thanks guys. This is helping out a lot. :D
 
They're expensive, but Maxtor Atlas 10K IV or Atlas 10K V are going to deliever the best multi user performance of any 10K drives available. A 73GB 10K.7 Seagate is $50 more $279) on ZZF than the Atlas 10K V ($229), and the Atlas is faster across the board. Ships with the same 5 year warranty, although the Atlas will have significantly louder seek noises due to a more powerful actuator and less consideration in design by Maxtor of acoustics than Seagate.

Also, Raptors are far from simply SCSI drives on SATA. They are actually good old PATA drives with a Serial bridge chip! In terms of physical drive geometry, they are similar to SCSI drives, but in terms of firmware, caching strategy, etc they are still tuned for single user desktop performance. WD has not marketed a true enterpise drive in years, and it shows in Raptor. WD does not have the design experience, customer feedback, nor the market necessity to market a powerhouse enterprise drive. Even with a controller that supports Raptor's _non-standard_ command queuing implementation, it is still significantly behind the latest crop of 10K SCSI drives in server performance. Atlas 10K V will get you 261 I/O/sec for $229 in a read only server DriveMark, while Raptor delivers 238 I/O for $179, presuming that you have a controller that supports its TCQ method. It's score falls to 208 I/O without TCQ. You're not going to realize any sort of high quality server performance using just any SATA controller, so I'd go with SCSI if you are expecting high multi-user loads (such as on your automotive forums) I'd suggest RAID 0+1 or 3x RAID-5 with a hot spare.

I agree that either Tyan K8W or K8WE will be fantastic motherboards, and 2 DIMMs per CPU arranged symmetrically will be great.
 
Thanks Doug. Hopefully once I get my turbo for my car done I can start putting this server together.
 
I'm not sure yet. I recently moved back home with my mother because my ex took my life. So, it's temporary because my mom drives me frickin' crazy. I'm hoping ot be out of here and back in my own place by the end of summer.

I'm hoping cable though. Why do you ask?
 
For MB, i would reccommend the Tyan 288x or 289x series. The 287x has regular PCI and not PCI-X so it would give very poor performance for Gigabit network and high speed storage (regular PCI is barely enough for Gigabit half-duplex!)

For RAID, forego the on-board RAID and use a decent 4-port hardware accelerated RAID card such as an Adaptec 2410SA. These come in flavors from 4 to 16 ports (2410, 2810, 21610) and one of the nicest features, aside from being fast, is you can expand the array on-the-fly (for example if you have RAID 1 you can add a 3rd hard drive and make it RAID 5 without taking the server down)

One of the nice things with Dual Opteron (or any dual for that matter) is you can start with one chip and add another later when you need more juice. Opteron 242 (1.6GHz) go as low as $175 per chip. Of course dual-core Opteron will come out and you can turn your machine into a quad!
 
I like that RAID cards. I might do that on my gaming rig, if it's possible.

When is dual-core supposed to come out?
 
Moose777 said:
I like that RAID cards. I might do that on my gaming rig, if it's possible.

When is dual-core supposed to come out?
Click to expand...

Those cards cost in the $300+ range. They sell for $299, $468, and $659 for the 4-, 8-, and 16-port cards respectively on NewEgg. You get what you pay for, but in this case the cost of entry is a bit high considering you can get 4 moderately sized hard drives for that price (80-120GB) In addition, if you want to add drives on the fly, you will either need a case that is easy to add in a drive without shutting the machine down, or SATA hot swap bays.

With the 8+ port cards AFAIK you can do RAID 51 and RAID 50. Both will provide a decent level of performance and fair to high level of failure protection. Some day i'd like to see RAID 55 on a card :D

As for Dual Core, the AMD road map makes it appear as though they will be released toward the earlier part of 2H 2005 (maybe in the summer?)
 
In any kind of production server environment I would stay far, far, far away from any kind of SATA RAID solution.

SCSI was designed to handle multiple disk requests simultaneously whereas ATA and SATA are still primarily used in single-user environments. I have used the 8-port Adaptec SATA RAID controller (I forget the model number) and I love it. It's an excellent card that provides terabytes of reliable storage for incredibly cheap. I have it connected to five 250-gig SATA drives and use it for file storage and backups of my other systems (streaming an NTBackup job or a ghost image to this array over gigE rewlz!)

However I would never use a SATA array for an environment like a web server or database server. As an experiment, run any kind of benchmarking tool against a shared SATA drive while copying files to it from two seperate machines. Do this as well with a SCSI drive. This is a poor man's simulation of multiple simultaneous disk requests.

Both disks wil show a massive drop in throughput, simply because there are other processes taking up bandwidth from the drive. However, you will see that the SCSI drive takes less of a hit.

For any kind of database or web environment, I would use 10k or 15k rpm U320 SCSI drives in RAID 0 + 1. This gives the necessary speed and redundancy you will need for your server.

Also, in difference to Pyromaneyakk, don't bother with the fancier RAID-5 options. RAID 5 alone with a hot spare is all you need, although when you get into bigger arrays with more than 6 or so drives, you can get into controllers that allow 2 or more hot spares.

Although you can put in two RAID cards, each with RAID 5 arrays and mirror them if you are feeling really, really storage crazy.
 
Pyromaneyakk said:
Some day i'd like to see RAID 55 on a card :D
Click to expand...
I did this once (in software) with 9 scsi disks, the smallest of which was 4gb. This gave a total size of 16gb for the array, and it was slow as crap.

Fun though, and I could have lost all but 4 of those disks without losing data.
 
agrikk said:
In any kind of production server environment I would stay far, far, far away from any kind of SATA RAID solution.

SCSI was designed to handle multiple disk requests simultaneously whereas ATA and SATA are still primarily used in single-user environments. I have used the 8-port Adaptec SATA RAID controller (I forget the model number) and I love it. It's an excellent card that provides terabytes of reliable storage for incredibly cheap. I have it connected to five 250-gig SATA drives and use it for file storage and backups of my other systems (streaming an NTBackup job or a ghost image to this array over gigE rewlz!)

However I would never use a SATA array for an environment like a web server or database server. As an experiment, run any kind of benchmarking tool against a shared SATA drive while copying files to it from two seperate machines. Do this as well with a SCSI drive. This is a poor man's simulation of multiple simultaneous disk requests.

Both disks wil show a massive drop in throughput, simply because there are other processes taking up bandwidth from the drive. However, you will see that the SCSI drive takes less of a hit.

For any kind of database or web environment, I would use 10k or 15k rpm U320 SCSI drives in RAID 0 + 1. This gives the necessary speed and redundancy you will need for your server.

Also, in difference to Pyromaneyakk, don't bother with the fancier RAID-5 options. RAID 5 alone with a hot spare is all you need, although when you get into bigger arrays with more than 6 or so drives, you can get into controllers that allow 2 or more hot spares.

Although you can put in two RAID cards, each with RAID 5 arrays and mirror them if you are feeling really, really storage crazy.
Click to expand...
Thanks.

Pyro, I'm not too worried about price though. I'm still planning it out and it's going to be a while before anything is actually done. I've got a list of all that has been said in this thread so I have it to reference when I start buying things.

Thnaks again. You've all been a great help. :)
 
Make sure you come back before you actually are ready to buy, as things might have changed. Technology improvements and all that.
 
agrikk said:
However I would never use a SATA array for an environment like a web server or database server. As an experiment, run any kind of benchmarking tool against a shared SATA drive while copying files to it from two seperate machines. Do this as well with a SCSI drive. This is a poor man's simulation of multiple simultaneous disk requests.
Click to expand...

You are comparing 7.2k to 10k ... Never erver can a 7.2k drive get neat SCSI performance in db or webserver environment ...

Try that with a SATA2 controller and some 74GB Raptors ... that would be a fair comparsion
 
Anarchy said:
You are comparing 7.2k to 10k ... Never erver can a 7.2k drive get neat SCSI performance in db or webserver environment ...

Try that with a SATA2 controller and some 74GB Raptors ... that would be a fair comparsion
Click to expand...

And even then SCSI still wins, and that's 10K to 10K. Maxtor Atlas 10KV is not that much more expensive than Raptor ($230 for Atlas, $180 for Raptor) and the Atlas delivers slightly better single user performance and much better multi user performance at the same capacity. The Atlas 10KV is also available in capacities up to (an admitedly very expensive) 300GB. With SCSI, he also has the option of upgunning to 15K if his loads get real heavy. And no, it's not an SATA-II controller you use to get TCQ support on the Raptor, as it's not a native serial drive, let alone native SATA-II. Raptor's TCQ implementation is not to be confused with NCQ, which is a part of the SATA-II feature set. It is totally up to the adapter manufacturer to build in support for WD's non standard TCQ implementation for Raptor. IIRC, there are some Promise SATA adapters that support this Raptor TCQ. I'm not aware of any other off the top of my head, but that doesn't they're not out there.
 
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