New server q's
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hello.
I've got to spec up a new server for a school.
It really doesn't need to be anything special.
My main question is what RAID level are people using these days & if I chose a server with spinning disks, would I look like an idiot who didn't know anything?
The server will need about 2TB.
A while ago I got help with RAM. One of the kind folks here explained to me that the server I was talking about (at that time) required a certain number of RAM sticks as the address bus was ???? bits wide.
As an example of what I mean, the server had 32GB of RAM and I got that from 2 x 8GB and 1 x 16GB. From memory the advice was I should have used 4 x 8GB sticks.
Can anyone confirm that for me??
Thanks for any & all help.
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Spinning disks should always be RAID 10. You may want to check the difference in pricing if you went with SSDs.
Questions for you --
- What is your budget?
- Have you considered refurb instead of new?
- What type of workload?
- What hypervisor will it be running?
- Any Windows VMs?
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@siringo said in New server q's:
My main question is what RAID level are people using these days & if I chose a server with spinning disks, would I look like an idiot who didn't know anything?
In 2022, yes you'd look like an idiot. SSDs are much faster and have significantly high reliability (server grade SSDs).
3.5" spinning disks for bulk storage is a very good use of magnetic media however.
RAID1 (mirror) of SSDs is all you need. It will outperform any spinning disk configuration. So 2 x 2TB SSD in your case.
If you want high performance you should use NVMe SSDs and software RAID.
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@siringo said in New server q's:
A while ago I got help with RAM. One of the kind folks here explained to me that the server I was talking about (at that time) required a certain number of RAM sticks as the address bus was ???? bits wide.
As an example of what I mean, the server had 32GB of RAM and I got that from 2 x 8GB and 1 x 16GB. From memory the advice was I should have used 4 x 8GB sticks.
Can anyone confirm that for me??What you were doing is called an unbalanced memory configuration and slows down the memory with 50%.
But it depends on the specific CPU. The number of memory channels on the CPU determines how many RAM modules you need for 100% performance.
So you have to search whatever CPU you want to have and you'll see how many memory sticks you need. The motherboard determines how many sticks you can use in total.
So a CPU with 4 memory channels should be configured with 4, 8, 12, 16 etc modules. This info is usually in the users manual as well.
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@Pete-S said in New server q's:
But it depends on the specific CPU. The number of memory channels on the CPU determines how many RAM modules you need.
Typical small servers today, like Dell R240, use Intel E2200 series CPUs.
They have two memory channels and can take 4 DIMM modules in total. So you should have either 2 or 4 DIMMs in these servers.
In the case of R240, the smallest supported RAM config would 2 x 8GB and the largest would be 4 x 16GB. Speed would be the same.
If you buy Dell they will help you get it right though.
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@siringo said in New server q's:
My main question is what RAID level are people using these days & if I chose a server with spinning disks, would I look like an idiot who didn't know anything?
RAID is dependent on many factors. It's not chosen in a vacuum but in conjunction with the choice of type, controller, and disks. You don't lead with RAID, all of those choices are a singular whole
And yes, in general, choosing spinning disks for a small system would be pretty crazy.
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@siringo said in New server q's:
As an example of what I mean, the server had 32GB of RAM and I got that from 2 x 8GB and 1 x 16GB. From memory the advice was I should have used 4 x 8GB sticks.
Can anyone confirm that for me??You generally want matching sticks and often they work in pairs or tuples. But, like the RAID, memory cannot be planned in a vacuum. You have to know your processor, motherboard and RAM options together. It's a singular choice.
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@Pete-S said in New server q's:
3.5" spinning disks for bulk storage is a very good use of magnetic media however.
Generally where bulk means over 8TB and where performance doesn't matter. To give some guideline to that phrase.
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@Pete-S said in New server q's:
In 2022, yes you'd look like an idiot. SSDs are much faster and have significantly high reliability (server grade SSDs).
Here is a real conversation I had last month.
"But we bought a fast storage system, why isn't it fast?"
Me: "How are you calling this a fast storage system? Nothing is fast about it."
Storage System: RAID 10 SATA drives, 8 of them.
Me: "My 2008 refurbed desktop that I got for $300 had 50,000 IOPS of performance. Your array has about 800 IOPS of performance. My ancient desktop from 14 years ago had 60x faster storage. Imagine how much faster a normal cheap laptop that your end users has is today. Why would your server, something everyone depends on so much, be so dramatically slower for everyone to share than the inconsequential storage everyone has dedicated to them?"
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@Pete-S said in New server q's:
RAID1 (mirror) of SSDs is all you need. It will outperform any spinning disk configuration. So 2 x 2TB SSD in your case.
I don't know the current pricing breakdown, but RAID 5 with 3x 1TB would do the trick too. Not as good, but if the savings turns out to be significant.
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Thanks everyone for the help so far, it's greatly appreciated.
The server is to be used to run Windows Hyper-V VMs up to about 6.
I was hoping to get something around the $AU4000 - $AU6000 range.
I think I'll up the storage to 4TB.
Software RAID. Gee I'm outa touch, that used to be frowned upon. Are we talking software RAID as supplied by Windows OS or is it specialised by the OEM????
I'd like to have 64GB of RAM as well.
How important is the CPU? Would I need a blazingly fast one or something slower but with more cores?
Speed isn't really an issue as it's for a junior school, I guess the work type for the server can be thought of as storage and services, ie: DNS, DHCP etc.
Thanks for any help.
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@siringo said in New server q's:
The server is to be used to run Windows Hyper-V VMs up to about 6.
Hyper-V is effectively dead. I'd rethink that. For all intents and purposes they dropped the product. It's definitely on its way to being gone entirely. Assume it's deprecated at this point and avoid any new deployments today.
It was never the leader in any way, but it was acceptable and we used it a lot, too. But now, you can't reasonably even consider it.
KVM is really the option today. They won the hypervisor war, there's really nothing else to consider for normal deployments.
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@siringo said in New server q's:
Software RAID. Gee I'm outa touch, that used to be frowned upon. Are we talking software RAID as supplied by Windows OS or is it specialised by the OEM????
Software RAID has never been frowned on by anyone that knew anything about RAID. Software RAID was the only thing that there was in the early days and the highest end enterprise systems have always been exclusively software RAID. Only in the Windows and VMware worlds did hardware RAID ever get a foothold and only because they were deployed on smaller systems that lacked resources and those platforms lacked (and still lack) viable Software RAID. There has never been a time that software RAID was bad.
However, if you are considering Hyper-V, that rules software RAID out right there. But not because software RAID is bad in any way, but because Hyper-V never figured it out to a point that you'd put it into production. But as long as you avoid Hyper-V and VMware (which you should do anyway), then you have enterprise software RAID options and you are good to use whatever makes sense for you.
All enterprise software RAID is part of the OS, it will never come from a third party, ever. Not that it couldn't, in theory, but market pressures says it won't. NEver has, never will. The best RAID has always been built into every OS platform for production except Windows and VMware, so there's never been any market for a third party to compete. It just doesn't make sense.
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@siringo said in New server q's:
How important is the CPU? Would I need a blazingly fast one or something slower but with more cores?
We don't know. THat totally depends on your workload. 99% of companies don't need fast OR lots of cores.
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@siringo said in New server q's:
Speed isn't really an issue as it's for a junior school, I guess the work type for the server can be thought of as storage and services, ie: DNS, DHCP etc.
Then a 15 year old entry level processor will do the trick. Get the cheapest used system you can. LIterally buy the lowest you can get and only one of them.
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@siringo said in New server q's:
Software RAID. Gee I'm outa touch, that used to be frowned upon.
It was "frowned upon" only as a myth in the Windows world. This came from the RAID in Windows being total crap and uselessly buggy. So many Windows Admins, not knowing RAID or systems administration or the broader world of computing, misassociated the problem with the concept rather than the implementation and started a myth that Windows Admins repeated to the point that no one ever questioned or evaluated the logic. Logically, how could software RAID be bad since hardware RAID uses software RAID? IF software RAID was bad, why did every enterprise storage system and server use it, always? All the big SAN systems that the same admins depended on almost universally use(d) software RAID. So in one breath people said it was bad, and also said it was the only thing they would use.
The issue was exacerbated by the FakeRAID market that preyed on Windows Admins as well. Since storage and computing concepts were so poorly taught in the Windows world, the entire market for third party software products that gave a high level impression of happening on hardware (but are easily detectable as not) arose to trick admins into paying a lot for something that wasn't really a thing. So in the WIndows world, FakeRAID also make admins who couldn't identify what they had blame software RAID instead of their own confusion.
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@scottalanmiller Thanks for all that Scott.
I didn't know Hyper-V was "effectively dead" and I'm not questioning that, but what makes you say that? Curious to now.
I don't have to use Hyper-V but if I don't, this school will stick out like a sore thumb as Hyper-V is used throughout this (Govt) Department.
When I did all my training, we were always told that hardware RAID was much faster than software RAID. That was when we were being taught about x86 server systems such as NT and NetWare, not OSs such as VMS, Unix, OS400 etc.
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@siringo said in New server q's:
I didn't know Hyper-V was "effectively dead" and I'm not questioning that, but what makes you say that? Curious to now.
HOw do you acquire it? Microsoft stopped releasing it as a product.
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@siringo said in New server q's:
I don't have to use Hyper-V but if I don't, this school will stick out like a sore thumb as Hyper-V is used throughout this (Govt) Department.
How are they keeping that updated? They no longer release a production version of Hyper-V so.... does this mean the entire department is running on no longer maintained software as the very core AND hasn't even discussed the future and is just... hoping for the best as if hackers and malware aren't a thing? Or is Hyper-V being deployed like a desktop system - which is the only form of Hyper-V still made, for end users not for production servers.
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@siringo said in New server q's:
When I did all my training, we were always told that hardware RAID was much faster than software RAID.
You were taught by people who didn't have the slightest clue what they were talking about. That's some seriously bad info.
Here is why...
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The speed is based on the processor, not hardware vs software. If the hardware RAID card has a faster processor (and memory combo) than the main CPU and RAM, then it would be faster. So the concept of saying this makes no sense. If we could make RAID cards that fast, we'd make our servers faster. It's totally nonsense to think that this would be the case. Whoever said this used no common sense.
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Software RAID runs on the Hardware RAID, so at some low level the two conceptually cannot be separated. That's not what they mean, but what they mean makes no sense.
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Enterprise Software RAID has always, no exceptions, been the fastest RAID. Hardware RAID has never had an implementation, ever, that was "the fastest". This isn't that the people teaching you were out of date, they were simply stating a common myth.
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There was a VERY brief time in the 1990s when Windows systems and only Windows systems (because no other system required 32bit slow Intel processors) could not scale up adequately to have the necessary CPU resources to dedicate to RAID and so enterprise CPUs were used in the RAID cards and not for Windows (Windows used consumer processors, so while servers could go faster than a RAID card, Windows servers could not for a time) and so they actually made RAID cards that were faster than the non-enterprise Windows servers. This was only true during the era of the Intel 386, 486 and Pentium, Pentium Pro and Pentium 2 processors - which is a VERY short time frame. In February 1999 the Pentium 3 was released and had so much performance that no RAID card has been able to compete with the main CPU, even on Windows machines, since.
So while the info was flat our wrong in every possible way, it's often based on a misunderstanding of an extremely brief and marginal performance advantage to RAID cards in a super specific, non-enterprise scenario in an era when Windows servers were marginal in the business world at best and only just starting to prove themselves and only Windows variations running on Intel 32bit (there were non-IA32 options during that era for which this did not apply, so even on Windows, it was never actually true that hardware RAID was faster - that only happened if you bought intentionally a slower server CPU and "fixed" the mistake by adding hardware RAID) had the issue. Since software RAID in every conceivable scenario since early 1999 (Windows NT 4 era) has been faster and this was broadly taught by Microsoft themselves, it was even required in their exams. It's often used as the example of fake information making it into the IT culture and being repeated by mentors to interns generation after generation.
Given that RAID was invented in 1987, and that hardware RAID devices didn't come out for a while after it was invented, that RAID 0, 1 and 10 probably never had hardware RAID be faster and that all performance reasons to ever consider hardware RAID were over by early 1999 it's amazing that anyone has continued to use or remember hardware RAID at all (it's expensive and weird, honestly) or that the industry ever existed or that anyone remembers the brief blip in time when hardware RAID was marginally faster for a very tiny, limited scenario.
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