<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 TRANSITIONAL//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; CHARSET=UTF-8"> <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="GtkHTML/3.2.5"> </HEAD> <BODY> <TT>Michael Blinn <<A HREF="mailto:mblinn@peopleplaces.org">mblinn@peopleplaces.org</A>></TT><TT> wrote:</TT> <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE> <TT> I'm nearing the purchase point of my terminal server, but I thought </TT> <TT>before laying down the serious $$, I should get the opinions of those </TT> <TT>who have been there before!</TT> </BLOCKQUOTE> I have just been through that. I was looking at building two dual - dual core Opteron 165 systems for about $7000 including 16 gB RAM. I decided that I could get more bang for the buck by using different configurations for the terminal servers and the web/dhcp/mysql/nfs server. What I came up with was: <UL> <LI>four AMD64 X2 3800 systems for terminal servers with four 40 gB drives in RAID1 and 4 gB RAM each <LI>two AMD64 X2 3800 systems for web/dhcp/mysql/nfs on /home and /var with four 320gB drives and 2gB RAM each in a fail-over cluster </UL> which costs about the same, except I get 16 heads on / for the terminal server and I get two extra chips working as separate servers. I get more horsepower overall except I have smaller caches. I should be able to run with one terminal server and one web server down, not that I expect that ever. I expect my LAMP stack to get a lot of work from about one third of my clients, so I thought this was better, separating terminal service from web/nfs/db. I believe I made the right decision even though the parts are still in transit, especially when the AMD cuts came in... The cut to AMD64 X2 3800 was close to 50%, and he threw in free freight... I will have 150 PXE thin clients usually with 50 old Windows machines useing web service, until they find out how much fun 3800 is compared to 400 <IMG SRC="cid:1154030183.27347.69.camel@beast" ALIGN="middle" ALT=";-)" BORDER="0"> when I expect to have 200 PXE clients. 30 clients were happy on my AMD64 3000 single core with 2gB, so I figure 50 will be happy with 3800 X2 with 4gB, especially when the PHP scripts aren't loading things down. I have Wikipedia, Moodle, phpBB, etc., available. With all the redundant storage and multiple heads, I doubt this system will get bogged down. <TABLE CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="0" WIDTH="100%"> <TR> <TD> <PRE> -- A problem is an opportunity. </PRE> </TD> </TR> </TABLE> </BODY> </HTML>