I've been thinking a lot about hardware setups. Its all about low-latency, high response time, high availability, not throughput!
Firewall:
- Little Valley - on-board and PCI 10/100/1000 nic, disk-on-module
- OS - m0n0wall or pfsense?
Load balancers:
- Little Valley? Fast FSB, processor, and decent sized L2 cache
- Hard drive
- OS - debian etch or pfsense?
NAS:
- Gigabyte mainboard with pci-e sata cards and gigE pci-e network card(s)
- RAM - 4GB or more?
- 4 hot swap drives = RAID 5
Apache:
- gigE for connection to NAS and database
- Hard drives - 2x = RAID 0
- RAM - 4GB
MySQL:
DNS:
- Low latency
- Little valley with gigE card (limited by PCI) to switch (intel)
- 1GB ram
- small case + power supply (iStarUSA)
- Disk on module
Jabber:
- decTOP!
- Asterisk / Askozia:
- PC Engines WRAP or t5125 thin client
General favorites:
- Low end: little valley, great price, solid product, good for firewall when paired with second nic (gbE to connect with LAN)
- Medium grade: via EN12000EG - great power consumption, decent speed, decent price, well supported gigE on-board, good for load balancers.
- high end: MSI Industrial 945GM1 - good RAM capacity, supports great chips with huge caches, dual gigE, good for servers
Where does something like the HP t5725 fit in with 256 MB of RAM and a great processor? DNS server? Load balancer? Askozia server? It is actually cost effective because everything is included, the board, box, ram, and all.
Cases:
Sources:
- http://www.techonweb.com/products/productdetail.aspx?id=D75257
- Logic Supply
- Mini-box.com
- newegg
Since originally drafting this post, I've been working with pfSense, which includes a load balancer. I've found it to be much faster and responsive than ultramonkey, and although I'm sure that has something to do with how I configured ultramonkey and the hardware I ran it on, I also found pfSense to be much easier to configure. Since pfSense can also provide high-availability through CARP, I'm going to switch to using it instead of ultramonkey for webserver load balancing.