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Lester Cheung
Asked: 2009-10-02 18:39:34 +0800 CST

Dream workstation for Sysadmins?

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I found myself constantly wasting time in dealing with hardware and would like to do something about it. Personally I have a Macbook that does all the mail/IM/IRC/browsing/music/devel VM and what not. I store mission critical data on a Solaris box with ZFS. Most of the development /production work is run under Linux - either on bare metal or under Linux KVM.

It would be nice to have a box that does all of these at my desk or at home - have anything actually done that? My requirement is simply:

  • being able to run VMs for prototypes and software testing

  • provides a reliable storage to host all the data + random backup

  • doesn't cost an arm and a leg (i.e. whitebox)

I can see 2 options:-

  • a Linux box with RAID1 and KVM - I lose filesystem snapshots and all the solaris goodness

  • a Solaris box with ZFS and xVM server - I never managed to get it to work with commodity hardware - remember this is for a workstation/desktop.

So to my fellow SAs: what kind of setup do you have?

[Answering my own question 3 years after]

At home, I have:

At work, I use:

  • a 27" iMac as desktop
    • whatever server the company provided for heavy workload.

VMWare Fusion was installed on both the macbook and iMac but it's getting less use these days...

virtualization

4 Answers

  1. As a counter-point:

    I also would rather not waste time dealing with hardware and configuration issues when it comes to my workstation but I've gone in the opposite direction. I aim for my work machine to be as generic & vanilla as possible and preferably a laptop. That way, if there's a problem, I lose a minimal amount of time replacing or rebuilding it and I can also be "ready to go" on almost any machine I might have to use.

    1. Most things I do with regard to system administration are on remote machines
    2. Everything I might work on locally but that is critical (scripts, documentation, etc.) I sync to the appropriate network location where it is backed up, protected by snapshots, checked into revision control, etc.
    3. I use VMs for the things you mention every day, I just run them on remote resource in the network rather than locally. That may sound spendy but it's possible that for not much more $$ than you'd spend to build out a super-duper workstation, you can buy/scrounge hardware to build a server or two to run a test/dev/lab environment. Depending on your organization, it can actually be easier to justify that since it theoretically benefits more than just you if other people can use it easily.

    This isn't to say I've never run a VM locally to check something out but if it's useful for more than a couple hours, I generally don't keep it local.

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  2. Not really a SF question, but anyway.

    After years of running expensive Dual-Socket systems at my home workstation (Dual Athlon, then Dual Xeon, then Dual Opteron), I've ditched the $600 motherboards for a run-of-the-mill Core 2 Quad 2.8Ghz, with 8Gb of RAM to match and a few 500Gb SATA drives thrown in RAID for good measure.

    I run Vista and all my guests in VMWare Workstation. 8Gb of RAM hasn't failed me yet, even when running a Proof Of Concept ESXi Cluster (4x ESXi hosts, each loaded with a few OS's and Hyper-V).

    Whole cost - AUD$900, purchased with my government stimulus money (not including peripherals like screen/keyboard/etc). I'm sure that in North America it would be much cheaper. Write off 10% of that price on tax deduction and that's a very cheap computer.

    Actually, I see you're in Sydney like me, so you'll have the fun of paying inflated prices just as I did :) Although I have friends in wholesale so I got it reasonably cheaply (the markups in consumer whitebox PC's are absolutely pathetic, 2-5% at most).

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  3. mac mini + time machine + vmware fusion ?

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  4. I run an AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3.0ghz, with 8GB of RAM. Two 500GB disks on LVM. Offsite backup. Two graphicscards and use two monitors(both 21,5"). This helps productivity immensly. I can switch between tasks easier and have more information displayed at a given time.

    I use VirtualBox and run three testing machines on them, worked flawlessly so far. I can snapshot and revert whenever i want. I can also boot all flavors of Windows, helps alot when you are helping someone over the phone to actually see what they see.

    With all this said, i would go for a quad core, allthough my system has a "low responsive feel" at almost all times. There are times when i compile and a VM is taking much CPU that i wish for a quad.

    Oh and Debian is my choice.

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