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I am running currently about 9 servers at home but they take up a lot of space and the cabling is driving me mad. Is there any alternative to blades for a home based cluster?

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What are you using the 9 servers for? A compute farm? Testing purposes? – James Apr 21 '10 at 21:21
Why do you rule out blades? – uSlackr Apr 22 '10 at 2:49
I have since found out blades are too loud – Zubair Apr 22 '10 at 6:35
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5 Answers

up vote 8 down vote

What's wrong with virtualization? If you're running a cluster for development & testing purposes, Xen/KVM/VMware ought to help out quite a bit. Buy a slightly bigger machine than usual and just build up VMs.

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urg! You beat me by 13 seconds. +1 – Matt Simmons Apr 21 '10 at 19:58
In addition to the space and cabling savings virtualization will also reduce power and cooling requirements as well as lower noise levels. – 3dinfluence Apr 21 '10 at 20:01
I've tried VMs but I found the performance to be significantly slower than dedicated machines, although maybe I had not set them up right. – Zubair Apr 21 '10 at 20:13
Most likely. Espeically as not all of your 9 servers run full time all the time. – TomTom Apr 21 '10 at 20:33
Zubair has another related question to this one which indicates that he's doing HPC type simulations or number crunching. So virtualization probably isn't a good solution. – 3dinfluence Apr 21 '10 at 23:46
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up vote 2 down vote

Depending on the hardware requirements for the servers, you could just go with one really big VM host.

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up vote 1 down vote

What are the performance characteristics you are looking for? Do you need CPU, memory capacity\bandwidth, storage capacity\IOPs, network bandwidth or all four? How much of each?

Just to echo Matt's point on one beefy box and using VM's. You can get some pretty beefy single boxes right now if you are prepared to spend a lot of cash - Quad socket servers with Xeon X7550's like the Dell R910 have 32 2Ghz full cores, an additional 32 Hyperthreaded ones, support up to 1TB of RAM (+$70k or so), 16 or so internal HDD's, 7 or more PCIe Gen2 expansion slots. Aggregate main memory RAM bandwidth is potentially somewhere in the region of 130Gbytes/sec (although in reality probably quite bit below that). That's a lot of computing power either way.

Unless you have some very specific requirements a single box like that can do a lot of work - one would typically be capable of handling the entire server requirements for a mid range SMB as virtual machines (30 or so servers, multiple AD servers, Exchange for a couple of hundred users, a few dozen app\SQL\web apps, file print etc). In the real world you would't use one of those for that, you would use a couple\three much smaller and more cost effective boxes that would also provide redundancy but the point remains about the raw horsepower.

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up vote 1 down vote

I would perhaps be looking at cleaning up your current solution. 9 servers is not a huge number (even if they are towers, rather than rack-mounted).

If you don't have them in a rack, perhaps grab a 2nd hand rack off eBay. Some cable management arms to keep the cables nice and tidy, a KVM to keep things accessible and a rack-mounted switch.

If I may ask, what's causing the main problems with your current setup?

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Cable mgmt arms block airflow - just say no! – uSlackr Apr 22 '10 at 2:48
Current setup takes a lot of floorspace, looks ugly, and I feel sick every time I look at it now :) – Zubair Apr 22 '10 at 6:39
But floorspace is the main problem, cabling is ugly too. – Zubair Apr 22 '10 at 6:39
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up vote 1 down vote

1st and 'best' answer: virtualization. Don't be fooled by the (very) slow graphics, good hypervisors (Xen, KVM, OpenVZ if all the servers are Linux) run at 'near-metal' performance for CPU, disk and network; but GUIs are not priority for servers.

2nd answer: compact servers. i like the Twin and Twin2 solutions by SuperMicro. They're 1U and 2U rackmount boxes that hold 2 and 4 mainboards respectively. Far cheaper and denser than Blade cages. The downside is that the mainboards are proprietary form factor. Not a problem at the office since we build all our servers with SuperMicro parts anyway.

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