Best Server?

[Andreas Ericsson]

Jan Scholten wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I am in the glorious position to choose what kind of server should be 
> bought for the monitoring server. But actually i have no Idea where to 
> put stress on.
> 
> I am using Nagios 1.2 to monitor about 200 Hosts and 400 Services but 
> that will be alot ( maybe + 600 Services) more when everything is proper 
> configured.
> 
> Actually i am running Nagios on a Celeron 300 with 128 Meg under Debain 
> testing, works but starts lagging (load up to 15) and webside is kinda 
> slow.
> 
> So i got the following question from purchasing guy: What sort of spec 
> do you think would be appropriate? What make/model CPU? Single CPU or 
> multiple? How much RAM?
> 

Put the bulk of your money on RAM and good disks. RAM to avoid swapping 
(which is a real performance killer), and good disks because it will 
speed up the web interface and will keep the disk crash at bay. 
Preferrably a SCSI RAID system if you can manage it. It should keep the 
system ticking for at least 10 years if need be.

In general, a dual CPU system with slow cpu's will get you better 
performance than a single ultra-fast cpu (to a limit, ofcourse). Make 
sure you use CPU's with nice, large L2 and L1 caches. This is mainly due 
to the fact that Nagios does most of its work just waiting to do 
something, so you'd be better of if the system caches the plugins and 
stuff for you.

Make sure you compile your own kernel and skip all the unnecessary cruft 
that comes with most systems by default. Use latest from 2.4-series, 
it's rock solid stable. Don't install a graphical user environment. For 
a server it's a waste of memory anyway.

> I believe because of the lots of spawned processes a Dual CPU would be 
> fine and some RAM. What would you recommend (be realistic i don't want 
> to have a Dual XXX that is idleing all the time)?
> 
> I was thinking about either a small Dual System (better opteron or 
> Xeon?) with around a gig of ram. Or a single AMD64 or P4 with a gig of RAM.
> 
> A configured Dell Server:
> Dual Xeon 2.8, 1 Gig Ram, 2 *40 GB Raid 1 Harddisks is about 1800 Euro.
> 
> a selfbuild P4 3.2 will be definitly cheaper :-)
> 
> 
> 
> Jan
> 
> 
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-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Lead Developer


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Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users.
Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. 
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