Recent content by joker535

I did try ESXi on the test server. It just did not work well (lots of problems with setup) and it required a windows machine to manage it with (which I don't have - at least any that are not VM guests) which was a deal breaker for me. I ended up using Citrix XenServer 6.5 and it worked quite...

I decided to test out smartos on a piece of test hardware I had laying around. Its an HP DL380G5 with dual quad core xeons, 16G of ram, and a 3TB R10 MSA attached. It ran but it was so slow it was really unusable. If it runs that slow on a machine like that I would hate to see it on a single...

Yep. Better efficiency, better security, and less cost (no licenses).

I prefer to keeps things a windows free as possible here. I fire up a Server 2012 R2 VM once in a while for testing and the occasional Windows laptop passes through but otherwise this is a M$ free household. I even considered using the free Hyper-V 2012 R2 core hypervisor but its a pain to...

I appreciate all the info you have put together here. I am going to have this machine hosting a VM that will be handling the same load as the previous machine plus have the ability to host a couple of extra VMs. I would like to keep a Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS VM and a Server 2012 R2 VM (I use...

I have run FreeNAS in the past and then last year switched to a simple samba setup using Ubunut 14.04 LTS server. The samba setup gave me a lot better transfer rates than FreeNAS but was slightly more complicated to set up.

Yep. I already have the raid card, cables, and drives. I will be using 16G of DDR3 1600 ECC unbuffered RAM to start with. If I need more I will jump to 32G.

I am pretty sure I will be going with the Xeon once I locate another one. I had found a US supplier with them in stock but I posted a link to it on another forum and the entire stock the vendor had sold out the same day (stupid move on my part). The E3-1230Lv3 (and E3-1240Lv3) is very hard to...

Interesting. I have never looked at that one before. Can it be installed to disk instead of just running as a live instance in memory?

After 6 years of 24/7 service my MSI wind nettop with an Atom 230 finally died (motherboard burned up) so its time for a new server. This machine was serving 4 websites (2 wordpress and 2 static sites one of which is a business site), serving NAS duty for storage and backups, serving music and...