Server component configuration advice

[satimis]

Hi folks,

Motherboard with sound card onboard
AMD CPUs - 2
RAM DDR3 1333/1600 - 8G/16G
OS - Linux/Unix 64bit
Virtualization software - Xen/Vserver/KVM
10 Mail servers to be installed

I haven't built server box before.

Actually I'm prepared to build a new AMD Phenom II X4 955 box with 8G DDR3 dualchannel RAM to test server consolidation/virtualization. However the cost of components for this new box is NOT cheap. Therefore I have another idea adding some more cost building a server to satisfy my curiosity in parallel gaining experience on its building.

At the beginning I'll run single CPU and 8G RAM and expand to 2 CPUs and 16G RAM later. In fact an AMD dualcore CPU with 4G RAM onboard can do the job for me. I have an AMD dualcore box with 4G RAM, dualchannel, onboard running 20 mail servers without problem. I'm considering that it'll be no reason to build a new PC on components of yesterday. Therefore I shed my eyes on AMD Phenom II X4 955 as the target CPU on the new box.


Kindly provide me some suggestion on;

AMD CPU - Opteron OR AMD Phenom II X4 955. Opteron is a true server CPU

Motherboard - for 2 CPU supporting min. 16G dualchannel RAM with onboard sound card.

Graphic card - I prefer having it onboard. However it is NOT a must. Because all servers are headless, not requiring video card, monitor and mouse. I'll configure the servers remotely on a workstation on LAN. If w/o onboard video card I'll put an old graphic card on the PC in case of need.

I have no budget in mind. But this new PC is for testing NOT for production. Therefore I expect saving some cost if possible.

Thanks

B.R.
satimis

[Rubberman]

Well, it sounds to me like you pretty much have your system spec'd out and all you need to do is find the best supplier/price available. That sort of depends upon where you live I suppose. In the US, I'd do some web shopping, or go down to my local white-box builder with my spec in hand and tell him to quote me a complete system. Usually, he can build it and sell it to me for about what I would pay for the parts myself because he gets better discounts and delivery terms.

[satimis]

Well, it sounds to me like you pretty much have your system spec'd out and all you need to do is find the best supplier/price available. That sort of depends upon where you live I suppose. In the US, I'd do some web shopping, or go down to my local white-box builder with my spec in hand and tell him to quote me a complete system. Usually, he can build it and sell it to me for about what I would pay for the parts myself because he gets better discounts and delivery terms.

Hi Rbberman,

Thanks for your advice.

Actually I'm interested to collect some advice on economic motherboard for server. I built many desktops in the past but never did a server. I'm now searching around for info. Thanks

For price comparison I can rely on web searching

B.R.
satimis

[Rubberman]

My personal preference for server boards are Intel boards, but that kind of eliminates the AMD chips as an option. Two quad-core cpu sockets, 6 sata ports (raid-capable is nice), 1 ide-ata controller (master+slave) for cd/dvd drives, dual gigabit ethernet ports, 8 dual-port fully-buffered ecc-capable ram sockets (32-64GB max capacity), the usual USB complement. My opinion is to avoid boards with built-in video. Get a decent, but inexpensive video card from ATI or nVidia. Since this is a server, you don't need tonnes of video ram, but if you want to do much computationally intensive floating point processing, then the nVidia GPU's are the way to go since they give you major math coprocessing capability. For servers, pay the price and get fully-buffered ECC ram. Boards that support it will generally have a BIOS that can let you allocate some % of RAM for redundancy, reducing the total available to the OS, but making the system much more reliable if there are any bit errors or cosmic ray showers!