Questions[server-setup](server)

I work for a company of about 50 people. Our two servers (identical) are custom built with these specs:

Xeon E3-1270 V3
Intel Entry Server Board
32 GB DDR3 ECC
2x 256 GB SSD RAID1 (for System)
4x 1TB SSD RAID10 (for Hyper-V VMs)
Windows Server 2012 R2 as Host and VMs

Each server hosts two VMs (2x AD + file sharing + roaming profiles, 1x SQL server for testing, 1x other (not important).

We perform daily backups using the built in Windows Backup on iSCSI targets hosted on a QNAP NAS (2x 2TB RAID1).

The servers don't have a lot of load and we never had any problems. Most of our data is stored in the cloud (VS Online, SharePoint).

But I wonder if it's sensible continuing this setup or if it's better to switch to professional server hardware, namely one big machine.

So what are the pitfalls and what should I do about them?

If computers were much simpler, there would be less points of failure which in turn might improve stability and simplify maintenance.

This got me thinking - for a smallish team of about 25 people, does anybody have experience with running certain lightweight services straight off a Raspberry Pi 2? I'm thinking of things like

1. IRC servers
2. Webmail (e.g. Roundcube)
3. VPN servers
4. DNS servers
5. Maybe LDAP?

These little machines require no moving parts (and no cooling whatsoever, they can happily operate in an air-tight casing) and they require very little power (about 2W). They are also very cheap - having one Pi per service would be no problem at all.

1. Many web hosting companies are now offering Intel Core i3/i5/i7 processors under "cheap dedicated hosting." But my laptop has an Intel core i3 processor, which makes it more likely a desktop processor than a server processor.

2. When I spoke to one of the web hosting company's tech support official about this, he told me that their "i3 processor comes bundled with ECC/Registered DDR3 RAM on a server-class motherboard (socket LGA1156)." Furthermore he told me this:

"We've chosen to offer this particular CPU as our "budget" server, but in no way lowers the quality of the actual server itself. We utilize proper cooling methods and also the same fans and heatsinks that we use on our Xeon CPU's.

The main difference between the Xeon and these i3' are that the Xeon processors can support multiple CPU's on the same motherboard, while these cannot. They're also marketed to be server CPU's, while the i3's are not, but they perform just as well under the same conditions."

I would like to take any input I get from the community. Is it good to go with an i3/i5/i7 processor, with the kind of setup mentioned above? or is there anything I should be worried about?

EDIT: To be more clear, I've got an Intel Core i3-540 Dual-Core processor (3.06GHz) with HyperThreading. And I will be running a wordpress blog on it (generates some 1-1.5 million pageviews a month).

I`m new to EC2 and I'm having some problems setting up my first instance. I followed this guide: http://www.robertsosinski.com/2008/01/26/starting-amazon-ec2-with-mac-os-x/ with the difference that I used

ec2-run-instances --instance-type t1.micro ami-7f418316 -k ec2-keypair

to create my instance. When I try going to the public dns provided (ec2-107-22-254-80.compute-1.amazonaws.com) I can't load the page. I tried running the command

ssh -i ec2-keypair [email protected]/

but received this message in the terminal:

ssh: Could not resolve hostname ec2-107-22-254-80.compute-1.amazonaws.com/: nodename nor servname provided, or not known

How do I properly set up a free micro instance on EC2?

and to tell browser to reload an object (and/or a page... everything on the site) only if is been modified since last visit time??? htaccess, httpd.conf... have you a ready directive right for my case? Thank You very much