Need suggestios on building backup server

[fogus]

So, I have a Hadoop cluster that I need to upgrade, and it has about 7T of unique data. I think I can do the upgrade without backing up, but why take that chance?!

I have a 20 bay (3.5") server and I found 12 @ 2T WD Blacks lying around. I went to boot my server up, and, to make a long story short, every piece of hardware (except the case) died.

I guess that time it went through a flood during a humid summer in the basement of an Iowa home and then was left to get moldy and then was powered on with 50VAC on the ground socket for about a month converting video files.

I have a new PSU on the way (same one I used to build my recent water cooled PC, which turned out awesome and silent). Other than that, nothing.

So, guys, Motherboard and CPU? I'll go with 32G of direct-from-crucial RAM.

1. I'd love something fairly cheap with at least 8 cores. i7-3820? Would put me in the LGA 2011 camp.
2. I'd like to run VMware ESXi hypervisor and (at a different time) CentOS (on baremetal).
3. I'd love to have dual or quad gigabit connections.
4. I have two PCIe adapters which connect to 8 SATA ports each, so I need at least two open PCIe connections. (I plan on using a software RAID to make the disks appear as one.)
5. I don't want to use a seperate graphics card. I have a spare working graphics card, but I just don't see the point of a graphics card in a server.

Thanks, guys!


Thoughts on DX79TO $203 here?
Also considering MBD-X9SCM-F-O and E3-1230 as it seems to be confirmed ESXi compatible.

[b-man1]

i have the 3820 and it's a great cpu. if you're looking at ESX (well, any hypervisor), the key is physical cores and disk I/O. most test systems i use that are desktop or laptop based suffer horribly on the I/O side once you hit 3-4 VMs running due to disk latency. sounds like you have enough spindles lined up to prevent that.

what will this server primarily be running? 32GB of RAM will work, depending on what you'll be running for VMs. you can always over-commit on the resource side and upgrade to more RAM later too.

for the NICs, i'd use at least one add-in card, depending on what the server will be doing. keep one allocated for the vKernel and management ports, then carve up the others for the vSwitch(es) and if possible, redundancy.

[ZYFER]

Here is your choices from a Newegg perspective:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... rchInDesc=

All the choices with a Dual Gigabit at best. All the boards in the list support at least 32GB of RAM, up to 96GB as well as 2 PCI-E x16 slots up to 7.

As for onboard video, none of these have one. Though plenty of choices for empty slots if needed.

Here is the listing for the Server-specific boards:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... rchInDesc=

Most of these have onboard video, but not at all. Up to 256GB of Registered RAM, but these are meant to be used with a Xeon processor.

[b-man1]

another thing to check out is backup options for the VMs themselves. there are a bunch of free versions out there, some fairly powerful. if you don't want to script backups manually in ESX, check out the free version from Veeam. It'll do ESX and Hyper-V...i think it's basically fully functional except for scheduled backups. it does have a powershell SDK, so you can probably script a basic backup via powershell too. if you do any work with Exchange, that same Veeam product lets you do restores down to the single item level, directly from the .edb files...which is GREAT if you ever had to do it via powershell instead.