About the Server

Introduction

This is the first time I have ever purchased a desktop computer of reasonably good quality for me to do some testing and play around with some technologies. I will use this server as my virtualisation platform as well as a normal NAS backup and media access server. Therefore, this series will all be based on what I want to configure or have configured on this computer. Hopefully you can enjoy reading it.

Hardware

The computer is running on almost the latest platform available when purchased (end of 2013 Q2), and it has the following hardware:

CPU

LGA1150, Haswell Boxed, Intel Core i7-4770

Motherboard

Asus TUF Sabertooth Z87

Memory

4 * Patriot Viper 8G DDR3 1600

Hard drive

2 * WD 3.5” Black 2TB 7200rpm HDD,

2 * Hitachi 2.5” 750G 7200rpm HDD,

2 * Seagate 2.5” 750G 7200rpm HDD

Power Supply Unit

Coolermaster GX Power 750Watt

VGA Card

N/A

Case

Coolermaster HAF902 XB

Because of the budget, I did not go for the Xeon processor and ECC memory. Of course, part of the reason is that I am not running any mission-critical systems, nor do I have a high CPU load all the time. I did not choose the i7-4770K simply because it does not support Intel VT-d, which is critical if you want to run virtualisation with high performance. The motherboard I chose is more about reliability, and the Sabertooth is the one with relatively better reliability and a reasonable price.

Hard drive space is limited because of the PC case I chose, which supports only two 3.5” HDDs and has space for four 2.5” HDDs. SSDs are not under consideration because of the budget and the fact that I am trying to build a RAID on the system, and I do not need that crazy performance. A 750-watt power supply is pretty much enough for this configuration even with two more mid-range VGA cards installed later. I did not choose any VGA cards because I don’t really need them. I think I may need them in the future if I want to do some brute-force testing or other GPU-related calculations.

System Design & Software

At this time, there is no popular distribution that can support the Intel Z87 chipset well. I was trying to use CentOS 6.4; however, I got a kernel panic when it was trying to load the installer. I was trying to boot Fedora 18 as well; however, it failed with no display after the Fedora logo had been loaded. Therefore I have to go for my favourite Linux distribution, Arch Linux, as it is distributed with the latest packages, which are likely to support a Z87 chipset motherboard. A later post will confirm that Arch Linux does work.

I am trying to have the following hard drive configuration:

• Four 2.5” HDDs run RAID-10, with my host operating system installed. Virtual systems will be installed on this RAID-10, and most likely I will go for KVM.
• Two 3.5” HDDs run RAID-1, used as a data backup partition loaded in the host or one of the virtual systems.

Of course, with Arch Linux you will not get a click-and-ready graphical installer to help you with RAID, packages or even the boot loader; you will have to do all of them by yourself. It gives you freedom, and as always, more freedom means more trouble for people who do not know too much and just want to easily configure a system and use it. In a later post I will explain how I install Arch Linux and configure it to meet my needs.

Summary

There are no more things I can discuss for now without the server installed and running. So please just wait for my future posts and I will explain how and why I configure the system in a way that I think is appropriate. If you find anything you do not understand or you think I am wrong, or you think some concept can be explained in a better and clearer way, just email me and I will be very happy to discuss any doubts you may have.