“Good” and “Not Expensive” don’t usually belong in the same sentence together…<\/p>\n
That said, here’s some general pointers:<\/p>\n
1) If you’re on the cheap, go for an Intel Core 2 processor. Dual or Quad Core, whichever, depending on how many VMs you want to run. Choose the ones with the biggest cache you can afford.<\/p>\n
2) The other advantage of running a Core 2 is that RAM (DDR2) is exceptionally cheap. You need lots of it. Lots and lots. 8Gb would be a good number to start at. Note that because this is on the cheap, there will be no error checking (ECC), so it’s not really that ideal.<\/p>\n
3) Disk I\/O is never going to be as good as it would be in a native solution, but it all comes down to what you want. Highly Redundant and Super Fast? RAID10. Massive storage with low cost? RAID5. By spending $200 on a motherboard you should get one with on-board RAID, but don’t be suprised if it doesn’t do RAID5.<\/p>\n
4) Steer clear of massive disks. My most recent app server has 5x 1TB drives, and I had a disk fail the other week. 1TB is a lot of storage to risk. Again, go for big cache over capacity.<\/p>\n
5) Most good motherboards will have dual NICs, however if they don’t, any half-decent PCI nic should do. If budget permits, get a dual nic card and use redundancy.<\/p>\n
For the record, the app server I recently deployed using desktop components is:<\/p>\n
Core 2 Quad 2.8Ghz\n8Gb DDR2 RAM\n5x 1TB RAID-5 (SATA-150)\nAdaptec RAID card\n<\/code><\/pre>\nAnd it runs quite nicely. On the flip site, the last app server I deployed with server components is:<\/p>\n
Dual Quad-Core Xeon 2.4Ghz\n24Gb FB-DIMM ECC REG'd RAM\n3x 74Gb SAS Disks\niSCSI remote disks\n<\/code><\/pre>\nBudget permitting, I would choose the 2nd server any day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Good” and “Not Expensive” don’t usually belong in the same sentence together… That said, here’s some general pointers: 1) If you’re on the cheap, go for an Intel Core 2 processor. Dual or Quad Core, whichever, depending on how many VMs you want to run. Choose the ones with the biggest cache you can afford. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknownerror.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknownerror.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknownerror.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknownerror.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknownerror.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/unknownerror.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7464\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknownerror.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknownerror.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknownerror.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}