RE: Re: OT: 5 new PC's required

["David Balharrie" <davidj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Graham,

What about using a case from shuttle? I have a SK41G
(http://www.shuttle.com/hq/product/barebone/specification.asp?B_id=10)
which
runs Windows 2003 server with IIS & SQL 2000 server for testing.  You
can
have two hard disks in it if you don't put a CD drive in the system. I just
plug in a CD drive as needed or share a drive across the network.  You need
to keep an eye on heat if your put two fast drives into the system. There
is
one fan at the back which cools the cpu and the rest of the system. This
keeps the systems noise down.  With 5 boxes running all at once it's still
going to be noisy.



Dave



_____

From: Graham Howe [mailto:graham@xxxxxxx]
Sent: 22 May 2004 12:09
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [ukha_d] Re: OT: 5 new PC's required



> > I need to get a little server farm set up ...
>
> Alternatively, one Very Fast (multiprocessor?) PC and
> Microsoft Virtual PC running five instances of W2003?
>

I did think of virtual pc, but I know it is a memory hog and the server
apps are already going to chomp memory. I'm pretty sure I can get away
with 1Gb of memory in each server for now, but trying to set up 5 on one
box with that sort of requirement is going to mean an enormous amount of
RAM on the machine. Also, I would assume that 5 average processors on
basic boards would probably be significantly cheaper than a
multi-processor board and cpus.

For anyone who is interested, it is a SAP Enterprise Portal I'm setting
up for development work, this software is huge and there is no point in
me trying to replicate a real commercial environment with puny kit. I
have been using servers the past couple of weeks with 512Mb RAM and they
crawled :-( The setup needs to replicate corporate environments, so
again several virtual servers wouldn't be exactly right.

So, back to the original question, I think I understand the pricing now
and it looks like 1Gb RAM in each machine is going to be the limit for
the cash. But I have yet to find a small case and motherboard that can
run quietly and can take up to 2Gb RAM and 2GHz processor. I'm not to
concerned about Intel or AMD and there will be no overclocking. Any
suggestions?






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