[SAC] Virtualization hardware specifications

[Alex Mandel]

Alex Mandel wrote:
> Howard Butler wrote:
>> If someone has the time, interest, and is confident enough about
>> hardware wankery, we need some specs and costs on a three well-appointed
>> servers to replace osgeo1, osgeo2, and a few blades.  Assume we would be
>> wanting to run Xen (or something like it) for a number of server
>> instances on each machine (more cores and more RAM, the better).  Assume
>> we're running at OSL, 2U's would probably be fine, and at least one of
>> the machines should have enough hd to run our trac/drupal
>> postgresql/mysql databases.
>>
>> How much can we get for $20k USD?  Being the lazy and rather uneducated
>> person that I am, I would head over to Dell's site and see what a
>> tricked out dual-proc Nehalem with 8+ gb of RAM would be and multiply x
>> 3, but I would suspect we could do better than that.  Alternatively,
>> should we just outsource the hardware procurement to OSL entirely, or is
>> having our own physical hardware something we really want?
>>
>> osgeo1 and osgeo2 on peer1 is not our hosting future, and we are
>> continually getting requests for more and more services.  Unless someone
>> has a better idea, I propose we start looking seriously at OSL for our
>> hosting home and decide if we want to be having our own hardware or be
>> completely virtual.  Let's try to have all of the bits in place by the
>> New York sprint (February or March) so we can piggyback our buildout,
>> development, and deployment with that event.  Sound like a plan?
>>
>> Howard
>>
> I can help with the research, and highly recommend silicon mechanics as
> a possible vendor. I know for my lab we just got a beefy 8 TB (RAID 6)
> plus 8 core, lots of ram machine for under $5000, and most of the cost
> was the hard drives.
> 
> In talking with some people I know who do this kind of thing a lot, they
> recommend kvm over xen these days, though I don't know the details both
> are good options. Note: Ubuntu now includes software to create clouds,
> it's on my todo list to investigate how it works.
> 
> Thanks,
> Alex
> 

I should clarify I believe we bought 4-8 quad core cpus.

More to come later,
Alex