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School me on Servers
Thanatos
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So, I'm trying to spec out a new server for my office. We have 28 users, and are currently running a six-year-old server with Windows SBS 2003. We're looking at two different possibilities:
1) A large Windows 2008 SBS server with VMWare and a dedicated virtual machine for an Exchange server.
2) A smaller file server running Windows 2008 Server with Hosted Exchange.
I don't even know where to begin; I've spec'd out PCs before, but this is an entirely different creature. I don't know what's good or bad. I've heard Dell and HP are the way to go, but that's about it. How much RAM do I need? How many processors? What else do I need to look out for? Thanks.
1) A large Windows 2008 SBS server with VMWare and a dedicated virtual machine for an Exchange server.
2) A smaller file server running Windows 2008 Server with Hosted Exchange.
I don't even know where to begin; I've spec'd out PCs before, but this is an entirely different creature. I don't know what's good or bad. I've heard Dell and HP are the way to go, but that's about it. How much RAM do I need? How many processors? What else do I need to look out for? Thanks.
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Unless you have government contracts or paranoid clients who absolutely cannot abide by you having your emails hosted elsewhere, go with hosted exchange. Managing and maintaining the health of an exchange server will dominate your IT resources compared to everything else, trust me. Also, Hosted Exchange will keep the biggest backdoors, namely OWA and ActiveSync, from running inside your local environment.
People may suggest you go with the professional paid-for gMail service; I will stand opposed to that simply because I can speak to the shittiness of sharing appointments with people in other environments. Almost all big business uses Exchange, or something that has no problems working with exchange calendar invites.
May I ask what kind of security you have planned for between the internet and your server? Do you have an ASA or something similar?
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
At the moment, we have a Cisco ASA and a Barracuda Spam Firewall between us and the internet (which kind of sucks, because we just renewed that a few months ago).
Our office already has Outlook, and I find it to be a fucking awesome program, so I really don't see any reason to switch away from Exchange; if we were looking at all new computers or opening an office, I would maybe check out other options, but I don't really see any reason to get rid of that particular environment.
That said, 2010 is a beast. We have it running in a VM (Hyper-V) on its own physical server. We could probably run more VMs on the server, but we don't need to at the moment. If we did that, Exchange would need its own isolated disk array (as it has now by default), and I would probably keep it assigned the 14G of RAM it gets now, and add more for the additional VMs. The RAM might be more than it needs, but it doesn't hurt.
All our mail comes in through AppRiver (third party spam/virus filtering), and the Exchange server only accepts mail from their servers.
We run into some quirks trying to use Outlook 2003 w/ Exchange 2010, but its manageable once you implement a couple fixes. Outlook 2007 and 2010 behave much better.
(edit: We have a couple Cisco ASA's and redundant internet connections. We used to do Dell servers until they burned us with a shitty PE 2850 file and backup server, which would just lockup and they were reluctant to work with us. We've since switched to HP servers and I can't complain.)
NintendoID: Nailbunny 3DS: 3909-8796-4685
We run 2 hosts on site for redundancy. If one fails, we can at least restore the VM instances onto the other physical server and be up and running.
Exchange 2010 will require a 2008 DC, but you'd be covered with SBS 2008.
NintendoID: Nailbunny 3DS: 3909-8796-4685
Alot of variables are needed to be looked at. I am going to pitch the HP side of things since I play with HP servers the most, they have in my experience the best support suites, best hardware and for the most part the server guys aren't morons.. I've also worked with SUN, DELL and IBM servers and they have there strengths and weaknesses but I know the HP gear the best as well as the support/warranty side of HP gear.
Anyways.. as someone said earlier if you can farm out exchange to a hosted service DO IT.
When picking a server we would need to know how much you guys are forecasted to grow in lets say the next five years, your current server room what are its power and cooling capabilities, do you have a server rack. Do you require redundancy?
The growth forecast will give you an idea what you will need and might need to have for expansion.
For HP the current generation of servers are the proliant G7s if you dont have a rack then you will be looking at an ML class tower, if you have a rack then DL class.
The G7s are still fairly new so they are working through some bugs with firmware but that tends to happen pretty damn quick with HP as well the firmware update process for HP servers is easy peasy.
There is a variety of different models but since the G6 series HP has been moving the servers to more of a Virtualization friendly machine, with more DIMM slots better Bus architecture and partnerships with VMware to make sure ESX runs nicely on the gear. As well power consumption has improved alot so your electrical bill will be lower.
As well for servers, you should be buying extended or enhanced warranty, HP servers come with a base 3 year warranty. onsite parts and labour but usually a next business day response next available tech deliverable. Most companies I work with usually will buy 24x7 4hour response (for either 3 4 or 5 years)
What that does is allows you to get same day parts (90% of the time, even HP has stocking issues from time to time) a tech will come onsite within 4 hours and you can make that call 24 hours a day 7 days a week. There is more to that but that is the gist. Really depends on how critical the server. There is other options for support as well but i'll leave that for now. Oh also where you are located would effect speed of response.. if you are in the middle of nowhere, and nowhere near a hub site it will take longer to get to than being in cities.
I'll leave it at that for now.
As far as growth, if you're talking about number of users, I anticipate us staying around 30ish for quite some time (the foreseeable future of the server, in any case). If you're talking about files, I'm not sure how much bigger we're going to get there, but I don't anticipate it being a problem; we currently have about 200GB of files (counting Exchange and all the software), so even if we start scanning a lot more (which I want to do), we probably won't get big enough for it to be a problem.
Have you thought about how you're going to handle file sharing? Are you just going to use mapped drives to the server or are you considering Project Server/Sharepoint?
Do you have a domain controller or does everyone just use local login?
You can get a cheap rack for like $400. In my experience our HP servers have lasted the longest of the bunch, so there's that. You don't want to be trying to support an exchange server. I have it for the most basic of email and it's still a nightmare sometimes. A single server, and maybe a NAS will probably be the best way to invest your money. Especially if the NAS is easily expandable.
An HP ProLiant ML300 series. They can be had in tower or rack mount and can be specced from base to pretty decently powerful
Up to 2 6-core procs
192 GB RAM capable
SAS and SATA capabilities
Power redundancy available
Low heat output
Plus all ML300 units come with iLO integrated controller, which is a great system for keeping your server healthy without touching it physically
(disclaimer: I work for HP, in storage R&D)
PSN - MicroChrist
I'm too fuckin' poor to play
WordsWFriends - zeewoot
We do have a domain controller.
You could probably get by nicely with room to upgrade if you go with an HP ProLiant ML350 G6 , which coincidentally is a model I just built a few weeks ago.
I'll post the link to the HP quickspecs on this unit.
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13241_na/13241_na.html
this unit has 18 DIMM slots in total
Max storage on the unit currently is 16 Terabytes or 8 Terabytes depending if you use LFF or SFF drives.
Then whatever you want to turn that amount of disc space into for RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 1+0 for the base controller in there RAID 5 requires a better cotnroller which can be picked off the bat depending on the model you want.
anyways give that a look over.
(disclaimer, I dont work for HP but did years ago in the service side of things, I now work for a company that partners heavily with HP and I am working towards my HP AIS for Bladesystems. )
Right now, all of our networking appliances are sitting on shelves, and our tape drive is on top of the tower. Probably sub-optimal.
before you start thinking your closet can handle a rack, measure how deep your closet goes.
MOST 1U-2U servers are much, MUCH deeper than you think.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Insight Control with iLO Advanced
24 Small Form Factor SAS/SATA or
14 Large Form Factor SAS/SATA
4 port Multifunction Gigabit Ethernet
Minimum 6 GB RAM, max of 144 GB
The nice thing about the DL370 is it's completely scalable - the basic model would probably fit your needs just fine right now and if the company sees any growth, it's more than capable of meeting future demands
PSN - MicroChrist
I'm too fuckin' poor to play
WordsWFriends - zeewoot
We've been around for 100 years, and to my knowledge, have been about the same size for the past fifteen or twenty.
If, for instance, you want everyone using RDP to the server, you'll want more memory and processing power. If this is just a file server? You can be much more lax about the requirements.
If anything, we'll be cutting down on applications a bit with the new server.
NintendoID: Nailbunny 3DS: 3909-8796-4685
I hate to say out of all the HP servers I would not recommend this one.. it is a pain in the ass. I have had more than a few clients have issues with this beast and let me tell you as someone who services the machine I would rather get punched in the face than work on one of these servers.
Of course your milage may vary but I hate these things, from the separate power backplane that has a mess of cables flowing everywhere inside the chassis to the shitty quad port PCI-E NIC that comes with it.
Once again this is anecdotal if someone has had great experience with these then great, but I've been out to service more than a few of these and the clients hated them.