Re: Advice on hardware server to use for small a dedicated data center
A few comments on the advice below
On 6/28/20 3:16 AM, David Christensen wrote:
On 2020-06-26 11:34, echo test wrote:
I view Debian as the dominant enthusiast Linux distribution in the
USA. I use it on my SOHO laptops and desktops because it mostly works
on most x86/x86_64 computers made in the last ~20 years. (But, it is
common for the "stable" version not to work on recently designed
hardware.) I also have a Ubiquitti Networks Unifi Controller
application stack running on a Debian VPS on the Internet ($5/month).
I am the only user and it has never failed. Other people with far more
knowledge, skills, and ambition do more with Debian, but the effort
appears to be both heroic and lonely. I have yet to hear of an
"enterprise" environment built on Debian, but you can tell us about
yours when you build it. (URL's for examples of such are welcome.)
Also pretty dominant in enterprise settings - particularly
universities. Still built primarily for use on servers. You find it
all over cluster configurations. Scratch a big data analysis cluster
and you'll likely as not find Debian.
I view FreeBSD as the dominant free x86/x86_64 BSD/Unix server
distribution. I use it on my SOHO servers because the design is
traditional, the feel is polished, software packages are recent, and
there are good books available [1, 2]. FreeBSD has notable enterprise
deployments and commercial derivatives [3].
Yup. Lots of old-timers prefer BSD for servers. I've been thinking of
migrating myself (I just hate systemd). Also a lot of OpenSolaris
derivatives out there.
But... for servers, I'd guess that (open source) Ubuntu & CentOS are
probably a lot more common.
with hardwares like Dell EMC PowerEdge or Lenovo ThinkCenter which
seems to never mention that they support Debian. What kind of issues
can I
encounter with such hardwares except simple cases like having to install
missing drivers with some already available firmwares.
You're looking in the wrong place. Look at the Debian site, for the
list of supported hardware. Look at the installation documents for
driver installation (which is more an issue for peripheral support - is
there a driver for every device that you plan to install?).
Note: I will need some RAID solution hard or soft.
"Enterprise" implies storage area networks. This requires hardware
(and support software).
No, it does not. Particularly in these days of converged hardware.
RAID is easy - Debian supports a number of software RAID options, and
most motherboards support some form of hardware RAID (as to many
external drive enclosures).
Sharing across nodes is easy, too - NFS.
Now, if you want to get fancy, and talk about high-availability,
failover and such, things get a bit more baroque - we're talking things
like real-time replication (look at DRBD), and fancy file systems. And
things get really tough, if you have multiple sites. Red Hat has some
good solutions, out-of-the-box, and last time I looked, they were all
based on open source components - you could integrate those with CentOS,
and probably Debian - but it takes a lot of work.
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why. ... unknown
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