School Server

The server at the school (200 students) I do work for starting having lots of issues. After seven years and the original hard drives!!, the finally let me replace it.

Current specs:

Dell PowerEdge 2900 III rack mount server
Dual Xeon 5320 with BSEL mod
10 gb ram 
(8) 160 gb drives running hardware raid 5 on a perc 5/i
LOUD and heats up the room

So, I decided to build a new server for them.

The server runs Proxmox 3.1 with three kvm virtual machines:

• Windows 2008 Server - AD and file server
• Windows 2008 Server - terminal and remote access server
• OpenMediaVault 0.5.35 - file, tftp, and intranet server

New server components:

LIAN LI PC-A04B Black Aluminum MicroATX Mini Tower
Rosewill FORTRESS-450 450W 80 PLUS PLATINUM
SUPERMICRO MBD-X10SL7-F-O uATX Server Motherboard LGA 1150 Intel C222 DDR3 1600
Intel Intel Xeon E3-1245V3 Haswell 3.4GHz LGA 1150 84W Quad-Core w/HT Server Processor BX80646E31245V3
(7) Seagate Barracuda 1 TB HDD SATA 6 Gb/s NCQ 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Drive ST1000DM003
(2) Crucial 8GB DDR3 1600 MT/s (PC3-12800) CL11 Unbuffered ECC UDIMM 240-Pin Server Memory CT102472BA160B

Server idles at 63 watts. I'm guessing the old server idles at over 250! The energy savings alone will pay for the server

I have proxmox installed one of the seven drives. Then I have two, three drive software raid 5 using xfs. One raid 5 for the AD server VM and one raid 5 for the other two VMs. Speed was beyond what I thought it would be :shock:

root@proxmox:/media/md1# dd if=/dev/zero of=test.dd bs=1M count=30000
30000+0 records in
30000+0 records out
31457280000 bytes (31 GB) copied, 75.611 s, 416 MB/s
root@proxmox:/media/md1# rsync --progress /media/md1/test.dd /media/md0/
test.dd
 31457280000 100%  308.32MB/s    0:01:37 (xfer#1, to-check=0/1)


sent 31461120069 bytes  received 31 bytes  322678154.87 bytes/sec
total size is 31457280000  speedup is 1.00
root@proxmox:/media/md1#

Server power use during the first test of writing to the array - 85 W
Server power use during the second testing of copying 30 GB file from one array to the other - 112 W

I was very surprised that the 2.6.32-pve23 proxmox kernel had drives for the haswell e1000e network adapters and the built-in LSI HBA There is also nothing better the SuperMicro's remote control. This board has a dedicated port for control and I did all of the installation from there (including remotely mounting ISO images over samba). It was a pricey board but if you are thinking about a good motherboard and separate HBA, I would get this board. It is cheaper than buying the two separately.

For backup, everything is written to my old HP N40L running OMV 0.5.35 in a different building. It has a four drive raid 5 array that keeps three sets of backups. I also have offsite backups at home

About $1400. A little pricey but it will last. I tried configuring a Dell or HP with that many drives, memory and that Xeon but couldn't even come close

The kill-a-watt readings/pics and the backup statement were written with you in mind :lol: I knew you would ask!

The students actually don't have anything on the server anymore since they use Google Docs. It is the teachers I have to worry about! :lol:

By the way, I am very impressed with this system. It is faster than my home server (xeon e3-1220v2) and has three less drives but idles 70 watts lower!

I got 1 TB drives because I didn't need any more space. They have a lot of files but not much video so not much space is needed. The current server only has 900 MB for both VMs. Each VM has 2 TB now and its own array for better speed.

Case, psu, motherboard, and cpu came from Newegg. Drives and memory came from Amazon. Got the drives from Amazon because Newegg had a three drive limit. The case is a pleasure to work with and it holds seven drives with good air from on all seven. The SuperMicro board was definitely worth it.

Low 30s C for CPU and upper 30s C for the mainboard. When it was syncing both arrays at the same time, the cpu temp was around 40 C and the mainboard was about 43 C. It would do better with a better cooler. The Intel cooler is small even if it does have copper in the middle. I didn't try but I could also set the fans for a higher speed in the bios.

Just out of curiosity, I plugged the old server into my kill-a-watt. At idle and no VMs running, it pulls 325 watts!!! The new one idles at 63 watts. Pretty decent power savings :lol:

If they keep this server as long as the last (6 years+), the electricity savings alone will pay for the entire server

Server was $1400. I don't know how much they pay per kWh. I'm guessing $0.10.