[K12OSN] New Server Capacity Thoughts.

[Robert Arkiletian]

On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 1:47 AM, Jamie Lists <jamielist at gmail.com> wrote:
> We're thinking of putting 2 K12ltsp servers in each of our schools.
>
> Our home directories are located on other fileservers and mounted via
> NFS to the LTSP server. The LTSP server will not be doing dhcp / bind
> / etc etc.
>
> Most of our schools have the 2 post telco racks. So we we're thinking
> of buying the half length SuperMicro cases.
>
> http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/1U/502/SC502-200.cfm
>
> With a SuperMicro motherboard/ 4 gig of ram / a single SATA 7200 RPM
> hard drive and one Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 Conroe 3.0GHz LGA processor.
>
> We're planning on trunking the  1gig nics together as well for a 2 gig
> connection to the switch.
>
> Clients will be assigned a server via DCHP. The DHCP table will have
> the MAC address of the client and the first choice of server to boot
> off of then the second and so on and so fourth.
>
> Mostly these will run clients at K-5 using flash based games like at
> funbrain.com.
>
> So my question is do you think 50 clients per server is a reasonable
> expectation?  I guess my main concern is the hard drive being a SATA
> drive (not the no redundancy part it just not being a SCSI striped
> RAID setup ) Even though it's not hosting the home directories will it
> be good enough for launching apps?

50 clients on flash. I would get a quad core if you can afford it.
Also unless you are going to use icewm I would get more ram too. Just
make sure your hardware can support a PAE kernel if you want to stick
to 32bit OS which I assume you do.
Software raid 1 would be nice too (faster reads)

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