[K12OSN] Server Planning

Mel Wade mel at melwade.com
Fri Sep 29 05:04:08 UTC 2006


Thanks everyone for the great repsonses.  It looks like I'm on track with my
personal guestimates, except for the bandwidth adjustments and adding a bit
more RAM.

Mel

On 9/28/06, James P. Kinney III <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com> wrote:
>
> I left out that a server of this type can be built for about $6k. As I
> have one of the top system build groups down the street from me
> (www.monarchcomputers.com) I use their stuff often.
>
> This puts the cost per seat at about $350 ($6k - server, 200 TC's at
> $300 [NTAVO box, 15" LCD monitor, keyboard, mouse] plus power strips and
> some network cables and all the software you can load!)
>
> Dell Dimension 1100 package (with 17" CRT monitor, LCD extra) is $680
> with MS XP Pro and a 90 trail anti-virus.
>
> On Thu, 2006-09-28 at 15:12 +0000, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> > 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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> --
> 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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>
>


-- 
Mel Wade
"The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do." - BF
Skinner
www.melwade.com
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