Hi guys,

I plan to build a server very soon based around either OpenSolaris or Nexenta and am still trying to decide which one will best suite my needs.

Basically this is what I was thinking of:

Getting a SuperMicro system board with 12GB of RAM and dual Pentium Xeon processors (it's going to be a DIY job built from scratch) - need to work out which one and IF I can get it as everywhere I've checked so far doesn't yet have anything supporting the 5600 series Xeon CPU's.

Then running OpenSolaris or distro on it with Sun xVM as core install which will also be used as storage service with NFS pool(s) over an expanding array of 2TB SATAII drives and various other backbone core services such as NTP, DNS etc.... Maybe even test out OPs Manager

The virtual machines I plan to run will be FreeBSD as I can easily install network monitoring tools on it: Cacti, Munin, Zabbix plus also monitor it using Sun's OPs Manager. On top of that several Linux distros for devel and testing purposes, an instance of either OSOL or Solaris 10 to be used with the Sun Ray Server Software, and an install of Windows Server 2008 R2 for testing Sun Ray Windows integration.

I am not sure if only the base install of OpenSolaris can be install so that I can selectively choose the components that I need, as you can do with FreeBSD or Linux to sort of tailor build the system to exactly what you need without custom compiling any kernels. I think Nexenta is bare bones build for servers but not sure if xVM is built into it??

So if anyone's got any advice I'd really appreciate it!!

Of course I could just go Virtual Box as that does everything but not sure if it works fully headless and also if there's a web GUI to manage it (not sure if there is one for xVM either but.... I do know that there is a GUI for it).

So far at work I've played around with VMware's ESXi which I liked only no GUI utility to manage it without paying and so now as my companies a certified MS Gold Partner we got Hyper-V as that was free but using MS Server 2008 R2 Core install is a real pain to get up and going from CLI as it's not UNIX.

The machine I'm building isn't going to be for work but for personal use so that I can really just develop my knowledge base further while having a stable server for storage and DNS resolving purposes!!!

Thanks and regards,

Kaya
_______________________________________________
opensolaris-help mailing list
opensolaris-help@opensolaris.org

Reply via email to