I have been thinking of getting a real server for when my new partner comes .. say June 2008 ? July ? I want everything to run smoothly when he gets here. I will be adding clients ... so I want to minimize downtime. What if I just bought something like this ... for testing purposes .. Concerns .... would I lose my ability to have a mapped folder on the server ? As it is now, all my PCs share a directory on my "server" PC, called S: drive (documents) and R: drive - applications (files to install applications). What advantages would there be ? Maybe buying a Windows 2003 machine is a better idea. I guess the advantages and disadvantages would fall into two categories - synapse related - other software related. ideas ?
Re: Advantages of getting a real Server ... I personally don't think it's a good idea to buy such old equipment ( the PIII ) for mission critical apps. The drives will be old, and who knows how long the capacitors etc will last. Even if it's for testing , you will still own a piece of ancient equipment that will be hard to dispose of. Most of those servers are quite large as well. I'd want to run a virtual server so that I can easily restore if the hardware dies and I need to restore my backups to a new architecture. So, I'd go for a grunty PC in the first place.
Re: Advantages of getting a real Server ... The PIII was just to play with a real server atmosphere. Migrating to a Virtual Server ... interesting thought. I did find the virtual server to be stable !
Re: Advantages of getting a real Server ... I use a PowerEdge SC440 with windows 2003 server, two 160g HD software RAID. Probably overkill for Synpase, but with peace of mind. How does a virtual server work?
Re: Advantages of getting a real Server ... I'd say that hardware raid is preferable to software raid, so not overkill yet! On my HP server I have ubuntu linux installed, and then vmware server. This allows me to setup a virtual PC running windows 2003 with the original license on the HP server. To backup the virtual server I can just copy the few files that constitute the virtual server.
Re: Advantages of getting a real Server ... I need some Server Version of Windows or a SAMBA connection to a NIX box as I am too frequently getting "Too many connections ... can't connect". Windows XP only allows 10 connections What would Dual GB NIC cards do for me ?
Re: Advantages of getting a real Server ... What's a good system to run virtual servers ? What are the specs of your server ?
Re: Advantages of getting a real Server ... I am using an old box, an HP Vectra with 2Gb of ECC ram, P4 2.4Ghz, and a few SCSI drives. On this I run Ubuntu desktop, with VMware server installed. And I run a number of different VMs include Windows 2003.
Re: Advantages of getting a real Server ... My Windows 2003 Server is running smoothly, but certainly isn't faster than Windows XP for file transfers.
Re: Advantages of getting a real Server ... Is the NIC faster? Is the processor faster? have you upgraded your network?