Home server hardware for Ubuntu 14.04?

[Tom Buskey]

My intro to Openstack was someone in sales from Canonical showing how he
used HP microservers and other parts from eBay to teach himself Openstack.
Juju was just being introduced and at the time, the minimal recommended
stack was 12 nodes.

He had the whole setup in his office.  12 HP Microservers running Intel
Atom (they have an AMD version too) maxed out to 4 GB RAM each.  I think
some will go to 8 GB.  He added $30 gigabit PCIe x1 card.  I think there is
a 2 port card out there.  1 gigabit ethernet switch, 1 APC PDU for when
IPMI wedges on the HPs.

Quiet enough to be in his office.  Low power enough to run from the wall
outlets.  Useful enough that people squawked when he took it down.

I've been using headless VirtualBox VMs to run my servers in.  It means as
long as VirtualBox runs on my host, I don't need to reinstall my servers.
My host does VirtualBox and fileserving.  Everything else is a VM,
including Plex (my media server).

I'm planning on moving my VM server to an Openstack cloud.  KVM feels like
it has less overhead than VirtualBox and like you, I'm doing openstack at
work also.

On Sun, Oct 5, 2014 at 10:17 PM, Henry Gessau <henry.gessau at acm.org> wrote:

> Joshua Judson Rosen <rozzin at geekspace.com> wrote:
> > Henry Gessau <henry.gessau at acm.org> writes:
> >>
> >> I want to set up a server at home for a bunch of projects and
> experiments.
> >>
> >> I need to use Ubuntu 14.04 server for the OS, and an Intel (not AMD)
> CPU.
> >>
> >> Canonical's certified list[1] is not very helpful. I assume 14.04 will
> install
> >> just fine on many systems, but I would prefer to have confirmation from
> >> someone/somewhere before buying something.
> >>
> >> Requirements:
> >> - Reasonably quiet. It's going to reside near me in my home office.
> >> - Intel VT-x support.
> >> - Four cores. More would be nice.
> >> - Must support at least 32GB RAM.
> >> - Preferably under $800 for chassis + PS + CPU.
> >>
> >> I assume it would need to be some Core i3/i5 variant. I don't need raw
> speed,
> >> so i7 is probably overkill, and I would prefer to keep the power low. I
> admit
> >> I don't understand the Xeon family at all.
> >>
> >> I was thinking something along the lines of an HP ProLiant MicroServer,
> or a
> >> Lenovo ThinkServer TS140? But I would be happy to assemble from parts.
> >
> > If you need more than 32 GB RAM, it doesn't look like you want
> > either of those machines: the Levno TS140 appears to max out at 32 GB
> RAM,
> > and the HP Proliant MicroServers appear to max out at 16 GB.
> >
> > Have you looked at ZaReason <http://www.zareason.com/>,
> > or maybe System76 <http://www.system76.com/>?
> >
> > I have experience with one of these:
> >
> >     http://zareason.com/shop/Breeze-Server-5880s.html
> >
> > It's very quiet and seems to meet _almost_ all of your requirements...
> > except for the ">= 32 GB RAM" req, which actually seems to be a little
> > exotic for this class of machines.
>
> Yeah, after much browsing I have come to the conclusion that most small
> home
> servers seem to max out at 16GB. The price class seems to be the factor.
>
> I have upgraded both my work laptop and my home desktop to 32GB, and I
> ain't
> going back. :) I work and play with OpenStack, where I spin up a bunch of
> VMs
> and then deploy them as a "cloud", which means further VMs get spun up
> inside
> those VMs. It's turtles all the way down and it eats RAM for lunch.
>
> >
> > (I've also had positive experience with a number of other
> > models from ZaReason, though not anything that meets your
> > requirements)
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> gnhlug-discuss mailing list
> gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
> http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/private/gnhlug-discuss/attachments/20141007/db539e63/attachment.html