We have a small office LAN (10 workstations) We are in the process of replacing our server. For one of our major applications we have to have a Windows Server. My plan is to run SuSE 9.3 x64 on the server, and then run Windows 2003 server as a guest OS using VMWare workstation 5.0. Windows 2003 is a supported guest of VMWare Wks 5.0. SuSE9.3 x64 is not officially supported, but SLES 9 is and I have read of a number of people successful running VMWare 5.0 on SUSE 9.3 x64. We will probably get an nforce4 motherboard. A number of these support SATA II (Sata300) drives. Although the transfer rate for SATA II is double that of SATA I, we don't transfer big files. I suspect that seek times are more important. Most reports indicate that the Western Digital Raptor is the fastest SATA drive, even though it is only SATA I. It has much faster seek times than the SATA II drives available. 80 GB Hitachi SATA II drives are available for $60 at Newegg, while the 74 GB Raptor goes for about $165 Regarding RAID, from what I have read. I would not use the nvidia raid included with the nforce4 boards, but use YAST to set up software raid. My plan is to use RAID 0 (I know that means no redundancy) and then use an additional hard drive for backing up the data files. I have read some old posts on the internet indicating that you can't boot from a RAID drive. i don't know if that is true or not. Or maybe it is wise not to boot from the raid 0 device. Also, should the swap file be put on the raid 0 device. One thought was to have three drives. The first drive would have /boot, swap, and /databackup. The other two drives would be raid 0 and be mounted as /. Does this sound reasonable. I would be interested in any experiences of software raid under SuSE 9.3 x64, especially if it involves the nforce4 chipset. i am currently looking at the following motherboards. ECS KNI Extreme DFI Lanparty UT nf4 MSI Neo4 Platinum Another option is the 3ware raid controller. It seems like overkill for our small shop. i am not inclined to use raid 5. Our current server had raid 5 with a Perc controller and 3 Ultra 160 SCSI drives. When one of the drives failed the controller began beeping like crazy, but everything worked Too bad i didn't know what the beeping meant. By the time I figured out what the beeping meant, a second drive failed and I had to reinstall Windows Small Business Server on the remaining drive. Any thoughts are welcome. Mike -- Michael A. Coan Woodlawn Foundation 524 North Avenue, Suite 203 New Rochelle, NY 10801-3410 Tel 914-632-3778 Fax 914-632-5502
On Monday 11 July 2005 4:40 pm, Mike Coan wrote:
We have a small office LAN (10 workstations) We are in the process of replacing our server. For one of our major applications we have to have a Windows Server. My plan is to run SuSE 9.3 x64 on the server, and then run Windows 2003 server as a guest OS using VMWare workstation 5.0.
Windows 2003 is a supported guest of VMWare Wks 5.0. SuSE9.3 x64 is not officially supported, but SLES 9 is and I have read of a number of people successful running VMWare 5.0 on SUSE 9.3 x64.
[snip] This just doesn't make sense to me at all.....sorry. Why nave a "thunking layer" to deal with just to run 'Bloze 2003 when there's BETTER native Linux software?! Fred -- Planet Earth - a subsidiary of Microsoft. We have no bugs in our software, Never! We do have undocumented added features, that you will find amusing, at no added cost to you, at this time.
Fred A. Miller wrote:
On Monday 11 July 2005 4:40 pm, Mike Coan wrote:
We have a small office LAN (10 workstations) We are in the process of replacing our server. For one of our major applications we have to have a Windows Server. My plan is to run SuSE 9.3 x64 on the server, and then run Windows 2003 server as a guest OS using VMWare workstation 5.0.
Windows 2003 is a supported guest of VMWare Wks 5.0. SuSE9.3 x64 is not officially supported, but SLES 9 is and I have read of a number of people successful running VMWare 5.0 on SUSE 9.3 x64.
[snip]
This just doesn't make sense to me at all.....sorry. Why nave a "thunking layer" to deal with just to run 'Bloze 2003 when there's BETTER native Linux software?!
Fred
I don't understand your answer. The particular applications in question are Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge and Financial Edge, a Donor Management program (we are a nonprofit corporation) and an accounting program that uses Microsoft's SQL Server and integrate together. These do not run on a Linux server. I looked high and low for good Linux Donor management software and couldn't find any. Anyway, it is moot at this point as it isn't likely we aren't going to change the donor management and accounting software. If you know of BETTER native Linux software than these, please let me know. There seem to be a number of quite adequate accounting packages in Linux, but almost nothing in the donor management area, and certainly no integrated packages that allow you to enter donation information and post it automatically to the accounting package. If you know of any please let me know. Mike -- Michael A. Coan Woodlawn Foundation 524 North Avenue, Suite 203 New Rochelle, NY 10801-3410 Tel 914-632-3778 Fax 914-632-5502
Mike Coan wrote:
We have a small office LAN (10 workstations) We are in the process of replacing our server. For one of our major applications we have to have a Windows Server. My plan is to run SuSE 9.3 x64 on the server, and then run Windows 2003 server as a guest OS using VMWare workstation 5.0.
So, what's the reason to install Linux if you need Windows? It won't become more stabile that way.
i am not inclined to use raid 5. Our current server had raid 5 with a Perc controller and 3 Ultra 160 SCSI drives. When one of the drives failed the controller began beeping like crazy, but everything worked Too bad i didn't know what the beeping meant. By the time I figured out what the beeping meant, a second drive failed and I had to reinstall Windows Small Business Server on the remaining drive.
Do not expect any pity from me! I had a good laugh. (^-^) Honestly, the normal reason there are special features in a server is not to maximize the available power. It is to minimize downtime by redundancy and sturdy components and replace parts that do break as easily as possible. Furthermore most dedicated servers come with some kind of software to continuously check the state of the hardware. If those ten people can not work with the major application on your server what does it mean for your business? Add to that the time you spend to reinstall the server and the mood in the office because of your downtime, perhaps even trouble with clients or problems because of data loss and you will quickly appreciate a sturdy server. If a lot of people are working with a server then even downtime is a real loss of money. Sandy PS: Recently I spend almost an entire week mostly to install and verify that our new UPS will work as advertised and that our servers will indeed shut off if the power comes down. I sleep better now. Of course, there are some more people at our office who would be a bit put off if they couldn't use one of our main servers. -- List replies only please! Please address PMs to: news-reply (@) japantest (.) homelinux (.) com
On Monday 11 July 2005 22:40, Mike Coan wrote:
We have a small office LAN (10 workstations) We are in the process of replacing our server. For one of our major applications we have to have a Windows Server. My plan is to run SuSE 9.3 x64 on the server, and then run Windows 2003 server as a guest OS using VMWare workstation 5.0.
If you must run windows, then this would be the best way to run it
Windows 2003 is a supported guest of VMWare Wks 5.0. SuSE9.3 x64 is not officially supported, but SLES 9 is and I have read of a number of people successful running VMWare 5.0 on SUSE 9.3 x64.
Yes, I can attest to that, it runs very nicely
Regarding RAID, from what I have read. I would not use the nvidia raid included with the nforce4 boards, but use YAST to set up software raid. My plan is to use RAID 0 (I know that means no redundancy) and then use an additional hard drive for backing up the data files.
RAID 0 is striping and will give you extra speed. But RAID 0 has the huge drawback if one drive fails, the whole thing comes crashing down, and you'll have to reinstall everything.
i am not inclined to use raid 5. Our current server had raid 5 with a Perc controller and 3 Ultra 160 SCSI drives. When one of the drives failed the controller began beeping like crazy, but everything worked Too bad i didn't know what the beeping meant. By the time I figured out what the beeping meant, a second drive failed and I had to reinstall Windows Small Business Server on the remaining drive.
The value of reading manuals. If you had known what the beeping meant, you could have kept the machine running (bar perhaps for the time it takes to throw in a new drive, if the hardware doesn't support hotplugging). This is why people have redundancy. Their time costs more than the hardware
Anders,
[stuff deleted]
Windows 2003 is a supported guest of VMWare Wks 5.0. SuSE9.3 x64 is not officially supported, but SLES 9 is and I have read of a number of people successful running VMWare 5.0 on SUSE 9.3 x64.
Yes, I can attest to that, it runs very nicely
Thanks for the confirmation.
Regarding RAID, from what I have read. I would not use the nvidia raid included with the nforce4 boards, but use YAST to set up software raid. My plan is to use RAID 0 (I know that means no redundancy) and then use an additional hard drive for backing up the data files.
RAID 0 is striping and will give you extra speed. But RAID 0 has the huge drawback if one drive fails, the whole thing comes crashing down, and you'll have to reinstall everything.
I realize that. I guess my initial thought was tht it is very easy to reinstall SuSE 9.3 (less than an hour). Since Windows server will be a guest OS, it will only be 6 or 7 files, so I copy over the files in 10 minutes and it is reinstalled. I figured that the time saved by using RAID 0 over say three years, would more than offset the time it takes to reinstall. Maybe that is foolish. Maybe i should use a 3ware controller and do raid 5. this time I will know what the beeping is :) Or would you recommend RAID 10 instead.
i am not inclined to use raid 5. Our current server had raid 5 with a Perc controller and 3 Ultra 160 SCSI drives. When one of the drives failed the controller began beeping like crazy, but everything worked Too bad i didn't know what the beeping meant. By the time I figured out what the beeping meant, a second drive failed and I had to reinstall Windows Small Business Server on the remaining drive.
The value of reading manuals. If you had known what the beeping meant, you could have kept the machine running (bar perhaps for the time it takes to throw in a new drive, if the hardware doesn't support hotplugging). This is why people have redundancy. Their time costs more than the hardware
My excuse is that someone else bought and installed the server, and since it was a Windows machine I tried not to get involved too muh. My mistake, If SuSE 9.3 supports raid10 or raid 0+1 in software, then i suppose i could just get 4 drives. I ahve heard that raid1 is fairly slow. Mike Michael A. Coan Woodlawn Foundation 524 North Avenue, Suite 203 New Rochelle, NY 10801-3410 Tel: 914-632-3778 Fax: 914-632-5502
Mike RAID 1 is not *that* slow - unless you are doing massive file transfers continuously. For everyday use in a server, data transfer rates are fine using RAID 1. It's easy to configure, great redundancy and to recover is very straightforward - install the new disk, partition it and then add it to the array and it will rebuild itself. I use RAID1 in quite a few servers and do not see a noticeable performance decrease (even in a machine based around a Celeron 366). As to hardware RAID - I'd only really touch Adaptec stuff and even then only with SCSI disks - it's tried and true. Software RAID works great for Linux boxes. Angus On Mon, 2005-07-11 at 21:09 -0400, Michael A. Coan wrote:
Anders,
[stuff deleted]
Windows 2003 is a supported guest of VMWare Wks 5.0. SuSE9.3 x64 is not officially supported, but SLES 9 is and I have read of a number of people successful running VMWare 5.0 on SUSE 9.3 x64.
Yes, I can attest to that, it runs very nicely
Thanks for the confirmation.
Regarding RAID, from what I have read. I would not use the nvidia raid included with the nforce4 boards, but use YAST to set up software raid. My plan is to use RAID 0 (I know that means no redundancy) and then use an additional hard drive for backing up the data files.
RAID 0 is striping and will give you extra speed. But RAID 0 has the huge drawback if one drive fails, the whole thing comes crashing down, and you'll have to reinstall everything.
I realize that. I guess my initial thought was tht it is very easy to reinstall SuSE 9.3 (less than an hour). Since Windows server will be a guest OS, it will only be 6 or 7 files, so I copy over the files in 10 minutes and it is reinstalled. I figured that the time saved by using RAID 0 over say three years, would more than offset the time it takes to reinstall. Maybe that is foolish.
Maybe i should use a 3ware controller and do raid 5. this time I will know what the beeping is :) Or would you recommend RAID 10 instead.
i am not inclined to use raid 5. Our current server had raid 5 with a Perc controller and 3 Ultra 160 SCSI drives. When one of the drives failed the controller began beeping like crazy, but everything worked Too bad i didn't know what the beeping meant. By the time I figured out what the beeping meant, a second drive failed and I had to reinstall Windows Small Business Server on the remaining drive.
The value of reading manuals. If you had known what the beeping meant, you could have kept the machine running (bar perhaps for the time it takes to throw in a new drive, if the hardware doesn't support hotplugging). This is why people have redundancy. Their time costs more than the hardware
My excuse is that someone else bought and installed the server, and since it was a Windows machine I tried not to get involved too muh. My mistake,
If SuSE 9.3 supports raid10 or raid 0+1 in software, then i suppose i could just get 4 drives. I ahve heard that raid1 is fairly slow.
Mike
Michael A. Coan Woodlawn Foundation 524 North Avenue, Suite 203 New Rochelle, NY 10801-3410 Tel: 914-632-3778 Fax: 914-632-5502
Maybe i should use a 3ware controller and do raid 5. this time I will know what the beeping is :) Or would you recommend RAID 10 instead.
I can recoomend 3ware to you I have used there ide raid cards for years with raid 1 . they have worked flawless for me with no troubles at all. just add a new drive to the array when one fails an they will fail at sometime or other, an it rebuilds itself like the other guy. Recently I put in one of 3wares sata raid cards an am using raid 10 on it for the speed. was told an read that its good to help to increase reading speed. we run an account software package that I have the data files on linux server running samba, it seems to be faster then it was with raid 1. jack malone
On 7/11/05, Michael A. Coan <mikecoan@woodlawnfoundation.org> wrote:
My plan is to use RAID 0 (I know that means no redundancy) and then use an additional hard drive for backing up the data files.
RAID 0 is striping and will give you extra speed. But RAID 0 has the huge drawback if one drive fails, the whole thing comes crashing down, and you'll have to reinstall everything.
I realize that. I guess my initial thought was tht it is very easy to reinstall SuSE 9.3 (less than an hour). Since Windows server will be a guest OS, it will only be 6 or 7 files, so I copy over the files in 10 minutes and it is reinstalled. I figured that the time saved by using RAID 0 over say three years, would more than offset the time it takes to reinstall. Maybe that is foolish.
I would avoid RAID 0 if you can. Unlike the other RAID levels, with RAID 0 the more drives you have in the array, the more unreliable it is!!! ie. if your drives have an average life of 3 years then: Single drive: 50% chance of failure in 3 years ( 1 - .5 ) Two drive RAID 0: 75% chance of failure in 3 years ( 1 - (.5 * .5)) Three drive RAID 0: 87.5% chance of failure in 3 years ( 1 - (.5 * .5 * .5)) etc.
Maybe i should use a 3ware controller and do raid 5. this time I will know what the beeping is :) Or would you recommend RAID 10 instead.
RAID 10 is the fastest and most reliable, but also the most expensive. Especially on writes RAID 5 can be very slow, but the more drives in your RAID 5, the faster it should be.
i am not inclined to use raid 5. Our current server had raid 5 with a Perc controller and 3 Ultra 160 SCSI drives. When one of the drives failed the controller began beeping like crazy, but everything worked Too bad i didn't know what the beeping meant. By the time I figured out what the beeping meant, a second drive failed and I had to reinstall Windows Small Business Server on the remaining drive.
I think Linux MD now supports RAID 6, or maybe that is some specific hardware controllers. Not sure. RAID 6 is like RAID 5, but it has 2 parity drives. In the above you still would have been okay until you lost the 3rd drive. Personally, I would not consider RAID 6 unless I was planning on having 6 or 8 or even more drives in the RAID set. With less than that you might as well use RAID 10. Greg -- Greg Freemyer The Norcross Group Forensics for the 21st Century
participants (8)
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Anders Johansson -
Angus Beath -
Fred A. Miller -
Greg Freemyer -
Jack Malone -
Michael A. Coan -
Mike Coan
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Sandy Drobic