Harvey Rothenberg <forensic2...@yahoo.com> writes: > I am looking for some ideas in-order to assist a friend of mine who has a > small business that recently has received a seven (7) year old Dell Server > that has little to none of this past seven years on this server for wear. He > says that he wishes to use this server as a NAS, but then starts to going > into his other interests
I suggest you carefully go over the power costs of this box; the old netburst p4 archatecture is super thirsty. (a single cpu P4 can sometimes use almost as much power as one of my dual socket quad-core boxes with 32 GiB ram.) Quite often the power costs alone mean that a more modern box (virtualized) pays for itself quite quickly. > Personally I would suggest for the system to be reformatted and setup again > as a VM Server, but with either a FreeBSD or Linux Host and other VMachines > as Servers to handle his other concerns possibly. He already has two (2) > Server on his existing Network. One is Windows (XP ?) and the other is a > Unbuntu. The big win with virtualization is usually taking a large box and chunking it up into many small boxes. Like I said, an 8 core, 32GiB ram box probably won't use much more power than this, and you can get the equivalant of a whole lot of 2GiB p4 boxes out of it. I question the usefullness of a virtual windows box with 2GiB ram. the other problem is that you probably don't have hardware virtualization on a chip that old, meaning windows (and other full virtualized things) is going to suck. Xen will run on it with paravirtualized guests, but after dedicating the ram to the hypervisor (64M) and the Dom0 (depends how small you can get a 2.6.18 linux install. I say at least 512M, but you can get away with less.) you are taking a usefull portion of that 2GiB out. If you really insist on using that hardware, FreeBSD Jails or the like might be the best choice of virtualization, as all 'virtual servers' share a great deal of the hosts' resources, which will make the 2GiB limit less burdensome. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
