[GRLUG] Raid, LVM, and Cheap Storage

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Tue, 2008-10-14 at 13:18 -0400, Tim Schmidt wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 12:54 PM, Adam Tauno Williams
> <awilliam at whitemice.org> wrote:
> > A guy at OLF said he had 39 VMs on one box,  two and a half racks of
> > equipment down onto a single 3U box.
> 3U sounds like too much...  we have a box here with 8 cores, 32Gb ram
> (16x 2Gb DDR2 DIMMs), 4x 750Gb SATA drives, 2x Gbit NICs, and a free
> PCI-E x16 slot in 1U.

But only 4 drives.  Some 3U boxes let you hold 12+ drives.  That is
pretty much an enterprise in a box.  The lack of any redundancy scares
me about that idea.  We have two identical 1U servers, each capable of
at least limping-along running all the VMs by itself.  I pretty much
adhere to a two-of-everything policy.

Our boxes are Silicon Mechanics Rackform iServ R258 
"1U Serverboard and LSI Controller are VMware  ESX  certified"
CPU: 2x Intel Xeon E5420 Quad-Core 2.5GHz, 12MB Cache, 1333MHz FSB
RAM: 32GB (8 x 4GB) 667MHz Fully Buffered DIMM - Interleaved
NIC: Intel 82575EB Dual-Port 10/100/1000 Mbps NIC (w/ I/OAT)
Management:  IPMI 2.0 Card with Management Interface and KVM over LAN
PCI Riser:  PCIe Full-Height Riser, UIO Riser, PCIe Low-Profile Riser
PCIe x8 - 2:  Intel PRO/1000 PT Dual Port Adapter - 2 x GbE (RJ45) -
PCIe x4:
Low-Profile PCIe x8:  No Item Selected
Optical Drive:  Low-Profile DVD-ROM Drive
Front Input:  1.44MB Low-Profile Floppy Drive
Power Supply:  Redundant 650W Power Supply with PFC - 86% Efficiency
<http://www.siliconmechanics.com/i14080/UIO-server.php>