Over the years I've used a handful of HP Micro servers to run a Linux-based web server application. To be honest I suspect it would comfortably run on a Pi, to give you some idea of power requirements. However it does need to be dependable and one of the criteria is RAID (software RAID 1 is fine).
We replace the hardware every few years so the question I have is: what is a good small server for Linux these days? Apart from the requirement to host 2 SATA drives there isn't much in terms of hardware requirements.
We don't even use a lot of disk space - maybe a few dozen GB. One HDD gets replaced annually so that no disk is older than 2y, using commodity disks in the 1-2TB range but partitioned to only use 200GB on each disk, just because we don't need more and it makes the swap to a new disk quicker. Hot swap not needed. Would consider SSD for the new server.
I was about to get a quote for an HP Gen10 MicroServer when it crossed my mind that maybe just buying the same server out of habit wasn't necessarily the right approach!
On Fri, 9 Dec 2022 at 15:48, Mark Rogers mark@more-solutions.co.uk wrote:
Over the years I've used a handful of HP Micro servers to run a Linux-based web server application. To be honest I suspect it would comfortably run on a Pi, to give you some idea of power requirements. However it does need to be dependable and one of the criteria is RAID (software RAID 1 is fine).
We replace the hardware every few years so the question I have is: what is a good small server for Linux these days? Apart from the requirement to host 2 SATA drives there isn't much in terms of hardware requirements.
We don't even use a lot of disk space - maybe a few dozen GB. One HDD gets replaced annually so that no disk is older than 2y, using commodity disks in the 1-2TB range but partitioned to only use 200GB on each disk, just because we don't need more and it makes the swap to a new disk quicker. Hot swap not needed. Would consider SSD for the new server.
I was about to get a quote for an HP Gen10 MicroServer when it crossed my mind that maybe just buying the same server out of habit wasn't necessarily the right approach!
-- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER https://www.google.com/maps/search/21+Drakes+Mews,+Milton+Keynes,+MK8+0ER?entry=gmail&source=g _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe send an email to main-leave@lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!
What did you find? I’ve been thinking about getting a small home server and other then interesting RISCV or Arm boards with M.2 NVMe drives the HP micro server still looks quite good.
If physical space isn’t an issue you can run ECC RAM with some AMD Ryzen motherboards. I guess something like that could be just as small and probably faster but at a higher cost.
If you only need 200GB of replicated data SSD’s might be a better idea these days.
Cheers, Dennis
On Sat, 18 Feb 2023 at 17:56, Dennis Dryden ddryden@gmail.com wrote:
What did you find?
TBH I didn't get any better suggestions than the Microserver. For my purposes we just needed to quote for the hardware and we don't have an order yet so I'm still interested in alternatives, but will go the Microserver route by default.
If you only need 200GB of replicated data SSD’s might be a better idea these days.
Agreed, that's one change we will make. It means it'll boot more quickly (although each new Microserver seems to take longer to "POST" in my experience and the boottime after that is insignificant by comparison), and will re-sync more quickly on disk replacement, but otherwise there's no real end user gain from SSD for this application.
-
Dennis Dryden -
Mark Rogers