[Cialug] Virtual Box and NAS

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Sat, Aug 13, 2011 at 4:53 AM, Dave Hala Jr <dave at 58ghz.net> wrote:

> Maybe the way to do this would be to pick up a refurb'ed rack mount
> server with raid and hot swappable drives and just put new drives in it.
> An older dual xeon server with a gb nic and a 1-2gb of ram has a lot of
> horsepower.
>
>
I've bought servers from this guy on e-bay a few times and had a 100% good
experience http://stores.ebay.com/PDNEIMAN?_rdc=1

He has several machines for under $500 that have more modern Xeon 5xxx CPUs.
If you do go this route, don't get the older Xeons that don't support
virtualization, especially considering how inexpensive these are. I'm no
expert but avoid the ones that say "dual xeon" without mentioning the model
number.

I'm speaking from experience on this one. Having virtualization support,
even if you don't think you'll need it, gives you tons of options down the
road.



>
> On Fri, 2011-08-12 at 15:20 -0500, David Champion wrote:
> > You would expect that, but some real-world testing of the cheap NAS
> > boxes shows differently. They use really low-end Marvell imbedded
> > chipsets.
> >
> > You can buy a Dell T110 for about the same price as a soho NAS,
> > sometimes cheaper. It has a "real" processor, a good Intel gigabit
> > NIC, and can hold 4 SATA drives, and has an ESATA port. Put your
> > favorite NAS type OS on it or even just a generic Linux distro, and
> > it's going to beat the pants off a Netgear or Dlink NAS, and probably
> > be more stable.
> >
> > Google for NAS benchmarks, there are several out there.
> >
> > -dc
> >
> > On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 3:03 PM, Matthew Nuzum <newz at bearfruit.org>
> > wrote:
> >         On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 2:24 PM, Dave Hala Jr <dave at 58ghz.net>
> >         wrote:
> >                 I really doesn't appear that there is much differance
> >                 between the
> >                 Readynas 1500 and the entry level Powervaults.
> >
> >                 My intent is virtualize about 6 servers and most
> >                 likely launch the VM's
> >                 from a central location. They are mostly low-medium
> >                 traffic webservers.
> >
> >                 I'm not against building a server, but ya know, if I
> >                 can just buy one
> >                 and plug it in, that's not always a bad thing.  I was
> >                 hoping to stay
> >                 around the 1500-3k range. How many people actually
> >                 build there own rack
> >                 servers anymore?
> >
> >
> >
> >         I totally agree. I would expect that a GigE connection to a
> >         RAID array (with presumably fast seek times) should be able to
> >         approach an IDE drive's performance. I don't know much about
> >         these NAS's you're mentioning but I've seen a low cost
> >         consumer device that can NOT saturate the GigE port and seem
> >         to be bandwidth limited by internal architecture. (<$200
> >         units)
> >
> >
> >         According
> >         to
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#Comparison_to_other_interfaces it
> suggests that IDE bandwidth just slightly exceeds 1Gb/s. Considering TCP/IP
> overhead that means you should probably expect slow-ide like performance at
> best. Probably not a great plan if your VMs need much i/o bandwidth. Fibre
> channel looks like a better choice if you can get it.
> >
> >
> >         I'll show my inexperience with this question: Is GigE 1Gb/s
> >         each way (total 2Gb/s) assuming you have a full duplex
> >         connection? If so then maybe IDE-like performance isn't
> >         unreasonable to expect.
> >
> >
> >         --
> >         Matthew Nuzum
> >         newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin and twitter
> >
> >
> >
> >         ♫ You're never fully dressed without a smile! ♫
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >         _______________________________________________
> >         Cialug mailing list
> >         Cialug at cialug.org
> >         http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Cialug mailing list
> > Cialug at cialug.org
> > http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug
>
> _______________________________________________
> Cialug mailing list
> Cialug at cialug.org
> http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug
>



-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin and twitter

♫ You're never fully dressed without a smile! ♫
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://cialug.org/pipermail/cialug/attachments/20110813/9f9ae067/attachment.html>