Building A Lab Server for Essential Business Server 2008
When we signed on to write the book Microsoft Essential Business Server 2008 Unleashed, I knew we couldn’t just run the software with some virtual machines on our desktop computers. This product is designed to sit on three to four separate servers. We really didn’t want to layout the cash to buy 3 separate servers when we really are running a test environment. Since Essential Business Server (EBS) supports running in a virtual environment, we decided to go with virtualization on a home built server to allow us multiple virtual machines on one physical box.
I started pricing out vendor solutions and came to the realization that our budget wasn’t going to cover the needs we had for RAM and disk space. A fully supported vendor solution is nice, and certainly support from a respected company would come into play for a production environment, but we are working with a tiny bit of advance money here. So, it was off to Newegg.com to start looking for parts.
Microsoft clearly wants to run this solution on modern hardware. It’s a 64-bit operating systems and software so you are not going to get away with an old P4 lying around a spare computer. We decided a modern Xeon was the way to go, because the prices are reasonable and the processors are powerful. This will provide us the 64-bit support required as well as the VT virtualization hooks in the processor. The Xeon E5410 2.33 GHZ quad-core CPU was our price/performance pick. SuperMicro is known in the white-box server world as a stable supplier of gear, so we also went with a SuperMicro motherboard based on the Intel 5000V chipset that has two CPU sockets. A 1U SuperMicro case that supports 4 hard disks was going to receive our gear. Why go with a tiny 1U server case when we are not in a data center? Simple, we want to eventually move this hardware into a co-lo data center and each 1U of rack space costs money. The trade off is a tight working space in the case and an abundance of noise from the small fans. We also filled the RAM slots with as much Buffered ECC RAM as was affordable. For now, that is 12GB in 2GB DIMMs. The 4GB modules are quite a bit pricier, but we can always move to them when the prices come down for a maximum of 16GB supported by the chipset.
We bought four 500GB Western Digital RE2 7,200 RPM SATA hard disk drives. These drives are intended for near-line storage solutions in a RAID array and are rated higher in MTBF than their desktop counterparts. These drives are not within the recommended specification of EBS, which calls for 10,000 or 15,000 RPM hard drives I know, but those server drives are very expensive and 15,000 RPM drives only come in SCSI and SAS configurations. The 10,000 RPM equivalent Western Digital VelociRaptors give 200GB less space and are three times more expensive. Also, 7,200 RPM hard drives have made significant performance gains in the past couple years. Lastly, cost!!! Seeing the money theme yet? We decided to forego a RAID controller for now because we are going to load the virtual machine hard drive files on separate disks for I/O bandwidth purposes. Another $500-$1000 for a good RAID controller will be in our future. We also bought a slimline DVD drive which is compatible with this case and a third party CPU heat sink.
Putting the computer together was not bad, since we ensured the case and motherboard were intended for each other. The routing of cables was the hardest part. In fact, we had to subsequently order longer 4-pin internal FAN cables because the fan headers are in various locations on the motherboard and there a four internal 12,500 RPM fans to hook up. The heat-sink also came in handy, as the Intel provided heat sink would not fit in a 1U case with the fan attached. We loaded Windows Server 2008 and started making virtual servers with Microsoft’s Hyper-V. It works pretty well. The only problem we will have is a minor one. The video card for Hyper-V virtual machines will not support anything past 16-bit color, which makes the new style icons of Server 2008 look jagged. This is really a concern for screen shots, so expect ugly icons in the book. Other than that, the server is fast and it is loud. We will likely have to play with RAM settings during the installation process as we load the virtual machines because we don’t have quite enough RAM to give every machine 4GB. There are useful postings over at the Microsoft forums that I’ll reference for that. I’ll keep you updated when we walk through the installation process.
A list of the parts used to build this server:
Western Digital Caviar RE2 WD5001ABYS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive (quantity x4)
Intel Xeon E5410 Harpertown 2.33GHz LGA 771 80W Quad-Core Processor Model
SUPERMICRO MBD-X7DVL-i Dual LGA 771 Intel 5000V ATX Server Motherboard
SUPERMICRO CSE-813MTQ-520CB Black 1U Rackmount Server Case
Transcend 2GB 240-Pin DDR2 FB-DIMM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) ECC Fully Buffered Server Memory (quantity x6)
Dynatron H185 70mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler
SAMSUNG Slim 8X DVD±R DVD Burner Black EIDE/ATAPI Model SN-S082H
- Eric Beehler
- Consortio Services/CS Techcast
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