[K12OSN] Server Planning

[James P. Kinney III]

On Thu, 2006-09-28 at 07:51 -0700, Mel Wade wrote:
> We are looking into providing K12LSTP 5.0 for two groups of about 100
> clients each (or one group of 200).  What guidelines should we be
> looking at for server planning to handle this load?

Dual socket, dual core Opteron 285 (2.6GHz), 8GB ram, 4 Gb ethernet
ports for data to the thin clients, 1-2 for upstream access (Internet,
NFS /home server), 3 high speed drives (2 in a mirror for the main
system, one for swap space and administrative storage). Use ethernet
bonding on the 4 TC ports and plug them into a dedicated gigabit switch
that feeds out to the downstream classroom switches. Classroom switches
can be gigabit uplink/100Mb classroom or all gigabit.

This will power about 200 thin clients. During boot up, there can be
some network bottlenecking. Remedy this by doing a cron scheduled boot
up of the clients with wake-on-lan.

This could be doubled by using quad-socket 8xx Opterons and 16_GB RAM
but the price per set goes up a lot as the cpus are quite expensive.

Testing shows KDE to be less of a memory/cpu load than Gnome. Other
environments are far lighter but less "complete" than KDE and Gnome.
(users get "warm fuzzies" more from KDE/Gnome than alternatives)
> 
> -- 
> Mel Wade 
> "The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do." -
> BF Skinner
> www.melwade.com 
> _______________________________________________
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> For more info see <http://www.k12os.org>
-- 
James P. Kinney III          
CEO & Director of Engineering 
Local Net Solutions,LLC        
770-493-8244                    
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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