I've chosen the DS6100 because it is the most powerful, space-saving, energy efficient server I could afford. It's ideal for the home environment due to its small footprint and quiet operation. Most importantly it has enough grunt for several virtualized workloads and doubles as a NAS. Check out the specs below.
- Intel Xeon E3-1265L V2 2.5 GHz Quad Core processor
- 16 GB RAM - Upgradable to 32 GB
- 2x 2.5" boot drives configured in RAID 1
- 4x 3.5" hot-swappable drive bays
- 2x Gigabit Ethernet ports
- 4x USB 3.0 and 2x USB 2.0 ports
- 1x VGA port
- 2x DC-in power supply ports
Now when selecting a server, the biggest challenge I found was getting all the features I needed at a reasonable cost. As this was going into a home environment, I was keen to keep all the hardware I needed to a minimum, ideally to one box. At the low end of the scale, you have your Network Attached Storage (NAS) and micro server solutions for your average consumer and on the upper end, you have your desktop pedestals and rack mounts for the professionals. You will be looking for something in between as a 'prosumer'.
Rather than tell you to get DS6100 or what server to get, I'm going to instead tell you what our server is going to be used for and leave it up to you based on that to select a server suitable to you. You can use the specs of the DS6100 as a guide. Our server will be the primary server for the Unit34.co domain and will be used for two main purposes. The first is as a file server and the second, as a virtual machine host. Our server will be running 24/7.
Servers and Roles
From then onwards, we'll be deploying servers as Hyper-V virtual machines on Carbon. The most important of these is our domain controller named Hydrogen. The table below is my initial plan for the servers we are going to deploy on our Unit34.co domain. Some of these may be able to be further consolidated.
Server Name | Roles |
Carbon | File and Storage Services and Hyper-V |
Hydrogen / Nitrogen / Oxygen | Active Directory Domain Services, DHCP Server, DNS Server |
Cobalt | Windows Deployment Services and Windows Update Services |
Nickel | Active Directory Certificate Services, Print and Document Services |
Copper | Network Policy and Access Services, Remote Access, Desktop Services and Web Server (IIS) |
Zinc | Windows SQL Server |
Scandium | System Center Configuration Manager and System Center Virtual Machine Manager |
No comments:
Post a Comment