I'm pretty new to linux but have a good understanding of networking etc. I am setting up DMZ network to host our website, SugarCRM, and mail service. We are a business to business company so we don't get a huge amount a web traffic as a retail ecom site would.. We use about 500 MB bandwidth a day. My question is how many servers do I need to set up a well functioning LAMP environment that also includes mail service. Currently I am hosting our SugarCRM site from a pentium 4 and it seems to do pretty well so far. Its an old computer.. a gig of ram, 2.6 mhz processor.. not really a server. I'm looking at purchasing 2 Dell Poweredge 2600's with the following specs: 1) (2) Intel Dual Core Xenon's @ 3.0 with 5 200 gig HD's @ 7000 rpm 553MHZ (x2) = 1086 FSB 2) (2) Intel Dual Core Xenon's @ 2.4 with 3 37 gig HD's @ 10000 rpm 400MHZ (x2) = 800 FSB I was figuring running the mail server, ftp, and apache on 1 server and MySQL on the other. I wasn't sure if I should put the CRM site on this set up or keep it in the lame old box its in now. Or perhaps I should use the lame old box for the mail server? Also I really need some advice on where to put the power. I figured on using the high speed hard drives for the data server and use the high speed processors and high capacity HD's for the webserver and mail server. Do I need another server to do this? Perhaps as needs increase then I could add another server? Any advice is much appreciated!
You could even run everything on one box if it has enough power. You might also want to consider virtualization, e.g. with OpenVZ or Xen. That way you can separate the web server from the mail server (for example) and allocate specific resources (e.g. RAM) to each VM.
If I were to run on two or more boxes what are the unique requirements of each server.. web, mail, data? What I was wanting to do is put the webserver in a DMZ and then put the dataserver on our main network or put them both on the DMZ and have a bridge into the main network to another dataserver that can carry out various processes in the background. I will be exchanging data with a progress database which our ERP system is on. This won't be quite in realtime but every minute or so. The company would not let me put the webserver in the same environment due to security concerns. Its my understanding that a dataserver should be able to write very fast so I was figuring using the high speed hard drives for this. Also, Is it better to pair different servers on the same machine then others?
As far as requirements, it really depends on content and the amount of traffic. For the webserver, will it be static pages with a few users or dynamic pages with a lot of users. For the email server, will it receive mail directly, or will it be out-sourced to a commercial site where they will do the initial spam and virus filtering and then forward the "clean" mail to your server to reduce the load. The company I work for uses one these services. By doing so, the mail server can run on a P3 700mhz machine with 128MB ram. We still run virus and spam filtering. I can't remember the company they use, but it something like this one: http://www.emeraldspamshield.com/spam-filter-overview.aspx As for the data server, I personally would not put it int the DMZ. I would use scripts to connect the server if at all possible. I do agree with using the faster hard drives on this server though. With the virtual servers that falko mentioned, the advantage of that is you could build independent servers on one machine. VS1 - Web_server VS2 - Mail_server VS3 - SugarCRM_Server All will run individually, just as if you had 3 different servers, but in one box. Another advantage of virtual servers is you can move them to another host if needed. Hope this helped.
