Best products from r/servers

Sorry for coming off strong -- probably posted at the end of a long day.

Yes, you want a VPN for local access, and not port forwarding. Yes you *can* run the VPN on your server, but it is better to run it on the edge device (so you aren't exposing your server directly to the Internet). I use one of these, with pfSense, as my firewall. It runs OpenVPN great. https://www.amazon.com/Firewall-Micro-Appliance-Gigabit-AES-NI/dp/B0742P83HY/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=protectli&qid=1564195635&s=gateway&sr=8-3

If you are comfortable with Windows I'd recommend running Hyper-V over ESXi. TBH I don't think ESXi really shows its value until you are using some of the higher end vSphere stuff. Hyper-V will run on Win 10 Pro so you don't technically need to shell out for a server SKU.

You can then throw whatever you want on top -- some Windows, some Linux (probably better for some of the tech you posted).

As far as hardware goes I like my home equipment quiet and energy efficient. I quite like the Supermicro Xeon-D and EPYC 3000 mini-itx boards. They pack a huge punch for the space/power/noise and IMO the up-front cost is well worth it.

So would there be no real benefit over having one NIC for the base system and one NIC for all the VMs?

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I havent heard of Mobaxterm or Terminus, Ill do some research into them at some point.


Money is kinda short for me, but Ive found a UPS for around £120
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B002RL0CKI/ref=psdc_430442031_t4_B007VHDKNY
Does this seem ok?
I had a look at some rackmount ones but theyre all £200 upwards (more than im going to spend on the R710 itself)

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It doesnt really bother me not running ESXi on the latest version unless they made a massive change like making live VM migration free or something. I havent done too much research into the other hypervisors as I have mostly seen ESXi and thought that was the most popular. Though I may try all of them later down the road, perhaps on a second system (I just had a thought, could I run a virtualised instance of the other hypervisors in ESXi?)

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From the little bit I have just seen, XCP looks pretty good.

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Does this switch look decent?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/TP-LINK-TL-SG1024D-24-Port-Rackmount-Unmanaged/dp/B003UWXFM0/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=rackmount+switch&qid=1555791974&s=computers&sr=1-4

I have found some of the same model cheaper on ebay and, with my very limited knowledge, this looks to be alright.

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Also, how would I go about distributing power from the UPS, surely 6 plugs wouldnt last long before needing to expand. I have seen some massive extension lead looking things with 20 plugs and stuff like that but I assume one small UPS wouldnt be able to power something like that.

Ha! That's so awesome, you can learn so much from just playing around with stuff at home. Congrats on landing that job before even graduating, you've literally beaten the odds!


So with the power thing, I'd get a rack PDU (Power Distribution Unit) that'll plug into an uninterruptible power supply which will clean the power and act as a backup. You can find rackmount ones on Amazon for pretty cheap. The Cyberpower ones are solid, in my experience. Just remember not to put too many thing on the circuit. Might even be worthwhile to get an electrician to give you an estimate on doing a 20 AMP line, which will give your stuff the ability to draw more power. Just make sure you get a 20 AMP rated UPS and PDU, too!


As far as the router goes, check out Ubiquiti, if you haven't already. They make pretty solid hardware that a lot of IT people seem to use in their home. I've set them up for enterprise clients and they're pretty reliable. Another option is pfSense. Maybe pick up an R210 or some small 1u server and use pfSense as your router. It's a cool bit of software that even lets you integrate intrusion prevention.


You could honestly build a SWEET setup for $5,000 so you're going to be set lol. Something I bet you'd really really like, is hyperconverged infrastructure. It's more expensive to learn and play with because you need 10gb interconnects and a 10gb switch, but if you use, say, Nutanix Community Edition, you could have a 4 server cluster setup with failover. You could literally unplug a server and everything will remain online. It's really awesome.

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So, with the KVM console, I ask the same damn question every time I see the cost of one of those. I'm not sure why they're so costly. I've always liked the idea of them too, but when I actually got one, it was more of a pain than it's worth because I'd rather be sitting at my actual desktop when working on my servers, so I have it setup where I can SSH or remote into all my servers from my computer. Maybe invest in getting an extra monitor or two, too. Another option would be a USB KVM switch that you plug all your servers into, then feed into a monitor and run your keyboard/mouse into it as well. Something like this or this.


Lastly, it's better to have too much space than too little space in a rack, in my opinion. Also, keep in mind that 1u servers are quite a bit louder than 2u servers. They've gotta push a lot of air through a smaller space, so they're not all that quiet.

Lol, im sorry man (or woman), but you're gonna have a tough time getting specific answers to extremely vague questions, let alone enough detail here to write an actual research paper. No offense.

I'm not sure if you're in college/university, or high-school and want to just get into IT, but this is a profession of specifics, but you should know now that all manner of it engineering disciplines, whether it's systems, network, or software, all deal in specificity.

There are literally hundreds of tools used and thousands of technical documents (publicly available, look up RFC papers) that cover this. If you want one good recommendation, it would probably be:

Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud https://www.amazon.com/dp/0133390098/

I have it on my desk at work and I work as an SRE for a large SaaS company (not gloating, just to let you I'm not just spewing nonsense). It's mostly focused on *nix systems but touches on Windows stuff a bit as well. For windows, you can look up the SysInternals Suite of tools they have available for free. It gives all the info necessary to monitor a hosts various stats, including processes trees, Cpu, gpu, mem, and disk i/o, including paging, dll handles, tcp connections, etc.

I'm not trying to be a dick here, but this isn't really the type of thing you can gloss through a Wikipedia article and write a full-blown research paper on in a night (unless it consists mostly of citations from other white papers). People literally spend their entire professional career learning this, it can't be learned in a cpl days. That being said, if it's for high-school or somewhere it won't be scrutinized too harshly, you can probably use a kindle, or the online version of the book I referenced above, and skim through it. It's pretty thorough, and if I had to pick one reference, that would be it.

Cheers!

25R5785 << you need two of these cables, which breaks out the IBM chassis power connector into 3 C20 connectors, giving you 6 C20's in total,

to plug in the C20's you can just hook them into a PDU, but since you don't have one, you'll probs need something like this : https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Server-Computer-Racks/IEC-POWER-ADAPTER-PLUG-SOCKET/B00S0O45X6 (basically a C19 to a C13 adaptor)

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HOWEVER! these things pull a metric fuck tonne of power, make sure your circuits can handle the power draw of this thing, probably need 32 Amp minimum supply

Hopefully that helps

Although these are low profile brackets,I would remove the brackets and find an old device with a full height mounting,remount it to full height and boom.. they are sas12 with raid, I would totally invest in something like this and keep the 2 drives,$207/$270 price range:

https://www.amazon.com/LSI-Logic-MegaRAID-9341-4i-LSI00419/dp/B00GTDTGES/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1479538818&sr=8-4&keywords=lsi+9341+8

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GTDT0VC/ref=pd_day0_147_3?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=M3NZ7N5MSK7KTGFD6N26

It would make for a really sweet experience, you will have loads of data to move clearly this will work out better for you..cut your transfer times in half from what 6gb can offer..computers only get more obsoleet

I paid $200 for this one (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000DZRY9C/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1). It's not that bad, but people do recommend just throwing them out (apparently, they're not 'user replaceable batteries'. You install PowerChute on to a Windows machine (VM) and it can turn off your servers if you'd like. I've never seen a UPS that can turn the machine back on (weird).

To accomplish this you would need an entire chassis, as the 3.5” model has a different internal configuration. If you’re creative, you could probably rig something up if you got a 3.5” backplane. If you don’t mind a bit of a mess, you could do what I did with my R410 and buy these extension cables and house the drives in these actively cooled drive enclosures. You’ll also want a sata to molex adapter to power the fan in the enclosure.

We use Juniper EX2200-C switches where noise is a problem, like in our classrooms. I would be surprised if HP does not have an equivalent.

https://www.amazon.com/Juniper-Layer-3-Switch-EX2200-C-12T-2G/dp/B005SFPCLO

This unit has 12 copper and 2 dual use SPF/Copper ports. I have one sitting on my desk and is working great.

So I can use these servers to suck the internet out of my community? This would be awesome to give me neighbors a piece of my mind! :D

But even if i bought a Cisco server router, like this. Your basically telling me that even if I bought a server router, the speeds coming out of my house to my isp is not strong, nor fast enough? I would have to buy some kind of commercial speeds from my isp?
http://www.amazon.com/Cisco-AS2511-RJ-Access-Server-Router/dp/B006WQO2Q4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1457653359&sr=8-1&keywords=server+router

People swear by the WD Reds so: https://www.amazon.com/Red-1TB-NAS-Hard-Drive/dp/B008JJLXO6

With the Nas you selected having 4 bays, I would get 4 and put them in raid 10, this would give you 2 tb of space for growing room, as well as a backup in the event a drive fails.

Thanks! I'm guessing this is the module?

https://www.amazon.ca/TP-Link-TL-SM311LS-Single-mode-MiniGBIC-interface/dp/B003CFATYW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1498497542&sr=8-1&keywords=SFP+module

With this cable?
https://www.amazon.ca/StarTech-com-Fiber-Optic-Cable-Multimode/dp/B0001Y7GU2/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1498497626&sr=8-6&keywords=lc+to+lc+fiber+patch+cable

Because it's FC-AL, from what I understand, I would need two of each, and plug one into one side, and one into the other and loop it back to the server? Or am I misinterpreting what FC-AL is?

http://www.amazon.com/Dell-D620-Laptop-Core-Windows/dp/B001U5617K/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1456870006&sr=8-1&keywords=old+laptop

That could be good?

Had no idea that existed, but I imagine something like this would work?

https://www.amazon.com/1U-Rack-Shelf-Vented-Cantilever/dp/B071YP4JL5/ref=sr_1_2_sspa?keywords=rack+shelf+19&qid=1550174295&s=gateway&sr=8-2-spons&psc=1

https://www.amazon.com/NavePoint-19-Inch-4-Post-Server-Adjustable/dp/B00LT6432U/ref=sr_1_9?keywords=rack+shelf+19&qid=1550174295&s=gateway&sr=8-9#customerReviews