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October 17, 2013

Development Servers – Why would you ever pay full price?

Recently, a project required a certain amount of horsepower, that a standard linux virtual image could not support. We had started to price out a brand new server that we could build from NewEgg, but took a quick look on Ebay. It was there where we had our “DUH” moment.

For less than $600 dollar we were able to build together a fairly decent and near-enterprise ready server (just missing support and primary raid controller).    We were able to bargain and “name our own price” for most of the hardware, to get the prices down even further from the “Buy it Now” prices.

  • Dell Precision Workstation: 12GB of ram, dual Quad Core 3.33 XEONs
  • Primary Drive: 74GB 10k Sas drive
  • Perc 5/i (should have gone perc 6) Raid Controller
  • Redundant Storage: 2 x 15k Sas 146GB drives
  • Perc 5/i cable splitter to go directly to SAS drives (instead of a Dell Backplane)

The only downside of an Ebay is the length of shipping.  They really need to have some sort of “Prime” shipping option, because sellers often took their time shipping our products.  If we were guaranteed shipping within a certain amount of days, Ebay would be our primary source of computer products.

Assembly of the machine took a bit of time.  We did have to make a few “modifications” to the Precision Workstation to fit all of the drives in there, but total time did not exceed an hour of build time.

Once the BIOS and drives where all working and the Perc5/i raid -1 array was built, we installed a copy of XenServer.  Installation was painless and we soon had our first VM setup in a few minutes.  The PERC5/i drives had some issues in XenServer.  Initially, it did not like creating a new storage pool on them for some reason.  Once we were able to set it up, it had been absolutely flawless.

While we have yet to utilize any of the great features inherent in Xenserver (load balancing/migration/etc), we have been pleasantly surprised with its performance.  The only nitpick we had for XenServer, using the XenCenter management tool, was that the ability to “Auto-Start” a VM was missing.  We figured out how to do it (source: <a href=’http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX133910‘>Here</a>), but it was a bit silly to have taken out such an important feature and rely on command line.

All in all, we were able to get our development server up and running and are happily mining data for a few projects that required the extra-muscle.  Ebay is definitely the way to go!

If you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to reach out and drop us a line!

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