[illumos-Discuss] [site - General Discussion - msg572] The Best Hardware to Use?

[Mike Riley]

On 12/31/10 11:29, illumos project wrote:
> https://www.illumos.org/boards/1/topics/572
> Frederick Littlefield
>
> I am new to Solaris. I have played with it for a few months, but I am really just a beginner.
>
> I have set Open Indiana and Solaris 11 on a Virual Box, VM setup, and have noticed that Solaris seems to work better with some hardware than others. I am going to build a Home Server with Open Indiana or Solaris 11. What I t to know is what is the best hardware, that is affordable for a home system? Is AMD better than Intel? What kind of motherboard should I look for?
>
> Brand and model suggestions are OK, but really what I want to know is what to look for when buying hardware for Open Indiana/Solaris? Do I need ECC memory for my server, or will standard memory work fine? Which Chip Sets work better? Anything else that would be helpfull? This is a learning project, so I don't want it to be a failure.
>
> I went on e-bay and looked for some Spark powered hardware, but really these are either too old or too expensive for a Home Server, correct me if I am wrong. I want SATA drives in the Box not SCSI, because of Price.
>
> I am looking to put 5 to 8 1TB disks for RAID-Z2 in the box so I will need either need lots of SATA ports or a SATA card or two.

You will likely have to buy it online, but I really like the ASUS KFN5-D motherboard.  You get
8 SATA ports on it (the hardware RAID is not supported, but also not needed with ZFS) it and
dual  Gb NICs (Broadcom).  It supports dual core or quad core AMD CPUs ( not the fastest, but
close enough) and 32GB of RAM.  Everything just plain works, including the USB, Firewire/1394,
and audio, and should be able to do everything you need.

I has it with 6 500GB (as RAIDZ) and dual 1TB drives (as mirrored boot ZFS drives), but my case
did not have enough ventilation for the 6 500GB drives, so I took two out that failed.  With 2
dual core 2.8 GHz CPUs and 32GB of ECC RAM I am running Solaris 11 with 3 or 4 Virtual Box VMs
running at full speed.  The Quad cores were too expensive when I got this, but I have a second
one that I intend to set up with quad cores and 2TB drives next.

The only cards I added were the nVidia GeForce 9800 video card (running dual 24" LCDs at
1900x1200 and an

While the new Intel CPUs use a similar memory arrangement they still require faster and more
expensive RAM, plus the CPUs are higher priced too.

If you want to find a newer model motherboard, try to insure that it has Intel or Broadcom NIC
devices on it.  Then verify that the SATA controllers are known to work on certified
motherboards and you will probably be fine.  Audio is usually fine these days.

Mike