[K12OSN] Just about ready to make a purchase

[Robert Arkiletian]

On 5/8/07, Jim Kronebusch <jim at winonacotter.org> wrote:
> I am finally ready to purchase the new server for our school and new thin clients.
> Below is what we'll be starting with, making the switch on labs and media centers first,
> next year adding teachers.
>
> -Dell PowerEdge 6800
> -Quad 3Ghz/800Mhz/4mb Cache Dual Core Intel Xeon 7130 Processors

So that's 8 cores!! What a monster :)

> -16MB 400Mhz DDR2 RAM (8x2GB to start, will handle 64GB total)

16GB  is more than you need for 90 clients.

> -Embedded PERC4e/Di RAID Controller

Is this a real hardware RAID controller?
Is this is a dual scsi interface controller?
Software or Hardware RAID?
Make sure half your mirror in the raid 10 is on one scsi interface. If
you lose one scsi channel you don't want to lose data from both sides
of your mirror.

> -6 300GB 10K RPM Ultra 320 SCSI hard drives configured in RAID 10 (3 striped 300GB
> mirrors for a total of 900GB storage, machine will handle 10 SCSI drives and a 2 drive
> media bay for future expansion, from my research this will give me the fastest possible
> read/write speeds while maintaining full hot swap redundancy)

Will your controller handle that many drives? 320 per channel can get
saturated with 4 fast drives working full bore. So the controller
might max out at around 8 drives.

> -2 Intel Pro 1000MT Dual port adapters for a total of four gigabit NICS teamed as one
> with ALB

Does NIC bonding work well for you Jim? I have heard that it does not
scale well. ie 2 bonded nics don't equal 2x performance. You might
want to look at separate subnets on each NIC connected to physically
separate switches as a means of addressing bottlenecks.
http://k12ltsp.org/mediawiki/index.php/Technical:Subnetting

> -64 Bit XUbuntu with LTSP 4.2 (I am thinking XUbuntu will give me some extra speed by
> not hogging as much resources as a Gnome or KDE based distro, 64-bit so that it can
> handle over 4GB of RAM, LTSP 4.2 since that is still the most scalable and stable
> version, and Ubuntu based distros seem to have a much larger software repository now
> that they have the full Debian repository included)

I would seriously consider K12LTSP 5.0EL (which uses LTSP 4.2) based
on Centos/RHEL 5 for this setup. Support lifetime and
reliability/support for server grade hardware.


-- 
Robert Arkiletian
Eric Hamber Secondary, Vancouver, Canada
Fl_TeacherTool http://www3.telus.net/public/robark/Fl_TeacherTool/
C++ GUI tutorial http://www3.telus.net/public/robark/