Hey peoples of the Know How community, I 've been tasked with identifying the best option for a ...

[G+_Joe K]

Hey peoples of the Know How community, I've been tasked with identifying the best option for a replacement WDS (Windows Deployment Services) server for my companies gov contracted IT deployment services. Ideally something from Dells current 13th Gen, PowerEdge, rack mounted lineup (our preferred vendor). Our current hand-me-down of a hand-me-down server is running on old, end-of-life, wide Ultra320 SCSI era hardware and I'd really like to step it up. Who knows when the next time we will get to update this thing, so I'd like to future proof as much as feasible. Especially for that fated day when our fed gov customer finally acknowledges that SSD's exist and that when everyone on the network is supposed to be storing their work on their roaming profile, there is no purpose for a 500GB 7200 RPM HDD in their $1,200 Optiplex workstations.

Obviously the big bottlenecks are the NICs, and the storage speed. What I don't know is how much RAM, CPU, etc. I should be considering. This would be connecting to a Cisco 3750v2 24pt Fiber switch for distribution. Needless to say, I want to saturate that switch. Maybe we'll even get to argue another upgrade.

 

Any ideas?

 

Thanks a lot!

[G+_Travis Hershberger]

I always have to ask, can you estimate how much of a budget is available?

 

My off the cuff answer is a Dell 720xd 24 2.5" chassis from Stallard Tech (www.stick.com), xByte.com or servermonkey.com.  All of those vendors sell refurbished servers, with the same sort of extended warranties available as new hardware.

 

Processor wise you'll be looking at more than you need by going with the recent generation servers.  Go ahead and get all the processors the box supports right away, as it can be quite difficult to upgrade down the road.

 

Memory, as much as you can afford to load it up with.  The 720xd example can hold up to 756GB of ram, which is going to be overkill.  "Normal" range would be 64GB on the low end and 128GB on the high end.

 

Storage wise get the biggest cache memory as possible and also the battery unit.  Dell's controllers will also normally support cache cade which allows the use of SSD drives as additional cache.  Makes so the frequently accessed data is super speedy.  Also throw as many spindles as possible in.  The IOPS delivered via the storage subsystem will normally be the limiting factor in performance.  I have an aversion to parity based RAIDs, so I'd be using a RAID 10.*

 

Networking wise, you should be able to bond multiple network connections with that Cisco switch.  So just add additional network connections that you want to bond together.  Just be sure to get the type of network card that's going to match the SFP adapters that are currently in the switch (looking up the info for that switch it could be either 2 or 4 ports.)  I wouldn't bother with connecting the server up to 100Mbit ports if I could avoid it.

 

Finally, virtualize, virtualize, virtualize.  This server will have much, much more processing and memory than you're going to use for a single WDS server.  Since you're already familiar with Microsoft products Hyper-V may be the way to go, but VMware ESXi** and XenServer are also good, reliable, and all of them have a free version that will get you up and running.

 

I know you probably didn't need all that explained, but I figure it will be a good reference for other people as well.

 

*Side note:  I've personally dealt with multiple RAID 5 failures.  Just avoid it at all costs.  RAID 6 may be an option in this case if you don't mind having to be down for 3-4 days to rebuild.

 

** ESXi free is limited to 32GB total system memory.

[G+_James Berry]

Your budget is one part and the other is how much data and usage is required. My work environment is using WDS with a very unified image structure (aka minimal). You will probably have more to deal with, especially security considerations.

 

Why only Dells and not HP ProLiant or another vendor (no government vendor number)?