Low powered 1U servers (local)

DrJohnZoidberg said:
The chipset in the Supermicro unit is actually quite beefy (for an Atom) with 8 cores it's pretty sweet. Virtualisation is definitely doable, not for resource hungry applications but firewall, mail gateway, etc it will be fine.
Click to expand...

Excellent. Even better still. If you populate the motherboard to the max with memory, then you can do virtualization without any problem (as long as the VM's doesn't require a lot of CPU resources)...

Off to do some planning.
 
The_Librarian said:
Excellent. Even better still. If you populate the motherboard to the max with memory, then you can do virtualization without any problem (as long as the VM's doesn't require a lot of CPU resources)...

Off to do some planning.
Click to expand...

Up to 64GB memory. :D ::twisted:
 
I bought this three months ago:
http://www.amazon.com/Supermicro-Mi...F8&qid=1412248264&sr=8-1&keywords=A1SAi-2550F
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009NB8WR0/ref=twister_B009UDYQJ4
http://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Tech...sbs_pc_11?ie=UTF8&refRID=1B63WZJSHJZXEQVJ6JHA

Cost me R7k.

All the items were sold by Amazon (not 3rd party selling on Amazon). Which means I don't need to worry about warranty. Amazon is WAY better than any local company about warranty.

I've built around 3 servers now with components from Amazon.com (The other was much more powerful). Just so much better than dealing with local dodgy suppliers.

My 2c
 
Wouldn't a rack mounted Mikrotik router achieve the same result?
It should cost < R10 000 plus you would have more network ports and local support.
 
Gnome said:
I bought this three months ago:
http://www.amazon.com/Supermicro-Mi...F8&qid=1412248264&sr=8-1&keywords=A1SAi-2550F
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009NB8WR0/ref=twister_B009UDYQJ4
http://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Tech...sbs_pc_11?ie=UTF8&refRID=1B63WZJSHJZXEQVJ6JHA

Cost me R7k.

All the items were sold by Amazon (not 3rd party selling on Amazon). Which means I don't need to worry about warranty. Amazon is WAY better than any local company about warranty.

I've built around 3 servers now with components from Amazon.com (The other was much more powerful). Just so much better than dealing with local dodgy suppliers.

My 2c
Click to expand...

What casing are you using?

pojo2 said:
Wouldn't a rack mounted Mikrotik router achieve the same result?
It should cost < R10 000 plus you would have more network ports and local support.
Click to expand...

Yes, it would work if I wanted a Mikrotik. I prefer using pfSense, I know it very well and all our configs are already set up, so when I get the new unit I can just copy all our settings directly over. Plus this device is more powerful so if I want to expand functionality to do mail or something else using VM's then I can. We have plenty of ports on external switches so don't need more LAN ports either.
 
DrJohnZoidberg said:
What casing are you using?
Click to expand...

Not 1U, it didn't go into a rack. Got an enclosure similar to this with plenty of mesh for a lot of ventilation (bought it ages ago tho)
The motherboard accepts 12v, so simply used a brick PSU that I had straight to motherboard. It has a 4 pin power connector on the motherboard which I use to power the SSD.

I didn't need more than Quad GbE but you may want to consider the 7x GbE version.

The price difference between Quad GbE and 7x GbE is so much that even if it where available I'd still not have bought it.
 
DrJohnZoidberg said:
Yes, it would work if I wanted a Mikrotik. I prefer using pfSense, I know it very well and all our configs are already set up, so when I get the new unit I can just copy all our settings directly over. Plus this device is more powerful so if I want to expand functionality to do mail or something else using VM's then I can. We have plenty of ports on external switches so don't need more LAN ports either.
Click to expand...

That box has a lot of potential with it's 8 cores & 64GB RAM limit via VM's to perform various functions all in a single box. Can't really be compared to a Mikrotik.
 
I've done a lot of investigation around Mikrotik and it doesn't compare to PfSense.

PfSense built a ridiculously powerful GUI around PF and it allows community developed plugins. For example I'm running Squid to cache HTTP on my PfSense alongside Snort which is arguable the best intrusion detection suite available.

When the SSL bug was released they had a security update 2 days later.

You can't beat PfSense for a low cost router atm imo. You'd have to pay a hell of a lot more to get something better.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I also made PfSense my local time server (it itself syncs from a few different time servers). Makes my local network setup super simple.
As an added bonus, PfSense works amazingly well with USB 3g Dongles. Better than anything else I've tried. Most 3g routers I get bad upload speed which I though was a network problem. On PfSense the experience was totally different.

Currently have a fail-over to USB 3g when my ADSL goes down. Amazing piece of software :)
 
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Damn, bought the wrong memory :D

Looks like both myself and ITS missed this one, this unit requires ECC registered SO-DIMMS. Just got plain SO-DIMMS and couldn't figure out why it didn't want to boot :D

Nico from ITS has been very helpful so far though and just doing a swap-out for the new memory.
 
Some techie porn, I took her top off:

20141008_101722.jpg
 
ponder said:
:D
Click to expand...

Hehe. I'll look into do a full setup/review when I get some time.

All I can say for now is that I'm very happy, everything works as advertised and I've had no issues with pfSense running on this box. It runs a bit hot, but that is normal as there is no active cooling on the CPU and ours is also not sitting in a aircon'd room either.
 
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