[K12OSN] New Building's LTSP Server

[Jeff Siddall]

Personal opinions:

You are definitely going to need more than 2 GB RAM.  CPU seems less
important.  I am running a quad core Phenom II, 8 GB with about 20
clients total, 10 or so being steadily used.  No performance issues
except it is easy for the GigE to get saturated if there are clients
playing video.  Video is killer for LTSP.  If you don't install flash
your life will be better :)

I would avoid SCSI drives.  Not because they are bad, but because your
money could probably be better spent elsewhere.  Modern SATA drives
perform great.  Also, definitely go with RAID1.  Not only will it buy
you survivability but you get 2X the read performance.  Software raid
works fine.  Avoid RAID5.  If you can afford it try SSDs.  They will
vastly increase the random IO ability of your system which is especially
important for LTSP.

When you are all done, spend any leftover money on more RAM.  16 GB is
definitely not too much.  Even if you don't need it for applications the
system will use it for cache which will make your server faster.

One other thing to consider: building one giant server may not be
adequate.  65 clients is a lot!  You might be better off building two
smaller servers for the same price.  You might also run into scaling
issues with file handles and whatnot with a large number of logged-in
clients.  Google for people who ran into that and the resolution they
found.  Localapps for pig apps like Firefox may help save your server
performance.

Good luck.  Please post your findings once you get things up and running.

Jeff