One of the clients I support has a Microsoft SBS 2003 server which runs Exchange 2003, SQL 2005, file and print and ISA 2004. They run it on an HP DL380 G5 which has 4GB RAM and dual Xeon 2Ghz CPUs and SAS disks on a P400 controller (I think they 10k RPM). The hardware is great but the performance is miserable on the software side (this isn't a MS vs BSD argument!). It takes 10 minutes to reboot the box. Currently the server supports 35 users.
What I want to know is what kind of hardware could I replace their existing server with if I was to run FreeBSD, Postfix, MySQL, Squid, Samba, PF etc?
At home I run all of this on an HP dc7100 desktop (P4 2.8Ghz, 1GB RAM and 80GB SATA drive) and its quick but I am the only user. Heres a brave/cheeky question, could this desktop (with FreeBSD, Postfix etc installed) match the powerful G5 server with SBS 2003? Lets ignore things like redundant power supplies, hot pluggable drives etc. I am purely interested in the performance for this particular company.
This may seem like a silly question but I am really keen to find out the power of FreeBSD on lower end equipment compared to more expensive conventional hardware most companies purchase.
What I want to know is what kind of hardware could I replace their existing server with if I was to run FreeBSD, Postfix, MySQL, Squid, Samba, PF etc?
At home I run all of this on an HP dc7100 desktop (P4 2.8Ghz, 1GB RAM and 80GB SATA drive) and its quick but I am the only user. Heres a brave/cheeky question, could this desktop (with FreeBSD, Postfix etc installed) match the powerful G5 server with SBS 2003? Lets ignore things like redundant power supplies, hot pluggable drives etc. I am purely interested in the performance for this particular company.
This may seem like a silly question but I am really keen to find out the power of FreeBSD on lower end equipment compared to more expensive conventional hardware most companies purchase.