Wouldn't Zentyal be nice to have at home?

[robb]

I'm in favor of a detailed wikipage about hardware and performance. It would be great to have some side-by-side tests of different competitors AND MS SBS...

[stuartiannaylor]

I couldn't run SBS on my machine but zentyal guesstimate at 100. It would be interesting.

[htt-thalan]

I remembered today that I do have something on standby - an older laptop at my parents house which I gave them to use for photo editing but they don't use it at all. It's an HP NX9420 notebook - Dualcore Centrino platform, 1gb ram. I can replace the harddisk with the CF card from the Debian machine and use a PCMCIA ethernet card for dual nic setup (together with the onboard one, which should be Gbit if I remember correctly) so it would be a perfect SBS server and firewall/router because the modem-side only needs the 100mbit from the pcmcia adapter anyway (40mbit internet connectivity). Internally I would still be running Gbit.

Gonna try to pick it up this weekend, firstly I wanna play around in VMware a bit.

[Talonaz]

Just wanted to say that this is a very informative post.
I to am new to Zentyal running 2.2 on a HP Proliant 360 4G with 2 dual core 3.4 Xeon and 4  gig of memory and a 72 gig drive (scsi320) what can I say got it for 50 bucks

So my question is how many modules can be run on a single computer? At current time I have every module load and I'm fumbling through and trying to learn how things work. The 2 things that tickle me pink are the Zentyal Dashboard and the fact that the above unit has 3 gbit nics and Zentyal sees all 3 of them. ( Ubuntu only sees 1) and from what i read it takes some work to see others ( I'm still NEW)

I currently run Windows home server 2011 and will be going back to WHS V1 I like the drive pooling.
My ultimate goal is to run every thing Web Server, Email, File Server etc etc FROM HOME

So again how many modules can run on one computer or would it be wise to split them up?

Thanks for your time Talonaz

[robb]

It completely depends on your hardware.
If you use that Proliant 360 you describe, as your home server (what I wouldn't recommend) you can run ANY module easily. That server is even overqualified for home use.
Especially for home use, I wouldn't split up anything. Imagine you run 2, 3, or more devices 24/7? the horror... not only energy consumption, but also administration and updates...

I will explain why I don't recommend your server for home use:
- Your energy bill will be huge when you use this server 24/7 Since this is a dual CPU server, you also have double energy costs. There are newer CPU's/APU's that are very qualified for serving all Zentyal modules with a fraction of the power consumption.
- This is a 1U server. It has only space for 2 harddrives. Home users tend to use quite some diskspace. With this server you have limited network storage. Ofcource you can store data on your laptop or pc, but that will limit the advantages of having a home server with central storage.

Now what would I recommend:
Search for low energy hardware with the option to add a few harddisks.
I would recommend Core i3 or AMD e450 APU based setups. Also larger SATA disks are recommended. If you want a very flexible system, and you are familiar with Virtualization, you could think of using ESXi installed om a USB stick.

Personally I like Supermicro hardware since you get business grade hardware for a price that is just a bit higher than consumer hardware.

[htt-thalan]

I to am new to Zentyal running 2.2 on a HP Proliant 360 4G with 2 dual core 3.4 Xeon and 4  gig of memory and a 72 gig drive (scsi320) what can I say got it for 50 bucks

Don't you see the lights dim ever so slightly when you turn that thing on? I think that's the main reason they let it go so cheap - you'll rack up the same amount on power every forthnight using it as a gateway/UTM at home...

[Talonaz]

HA HA believe it or not NO! I don't that happens when my brother Laser printer warms up then they dim. But hay I like the sound of jets engnes any how so I'm cool with it I will be putting in on a closet once I get a server rack.

[htt-thalan]

I take it you don't have to pay for your own electricity?

[JeanPaulvanHamond]

Try the HP Proliant Microserver N40L we use the N36 and N40 for small businesses and they run really good. They are cheap (249 euro) have a TII N40L, 2GB, 250GB. Buy a other 250GB drive and 2 big 1 or 2TB disks and you have a great server for a low price with low power consumption. If u buy a pci-e 1Gbit network adapter you even have a great gateway.

[Talonaz]

I take it you don't have to pay for your own electricity?

Sorry I do pay the electric bill 

[pcperfect]

obviously - its all based on personal experience, 


@christian i had terrible speeds when routing at an atom 520,  with firewall  and non-transperrant proxy for  6 above avarage users   but once one would start using utube or torrents (i had already set the max downloads to 1 at a time)... all connections dropped to rediculous low speeds where they didn't with a more solid cpu.  and using qos to solve it almost brought the whole system down.   - so i would love to read some stats about your setup.

Atom should be fine for iptables, must have been the proxy with maybe huge filtering lists or file scanning in some way. (Although squid/squidguard servers are also very light on usage, but never tried them on atoms tho (but i do run those since pentium mmx without much trouble, but internet was also much slower these days)).
I route mid size businesses (50 users) over openwrt routers with QoS using shorewall without any noticable slowdown, and they don't even compare to atoms.

Also used an atom 330 as home router/downloader on 60mbit fiber without any problem and getting max speeds. In fact it replaced a P3 which also did fine (didn't want a P4 as they use too much energy, sure P3 was slow on unpacking downloads, but they run in the background anyway so i didn't care).
I replaced it with an i3 though because i needed hardware VM and current atoms don't support that. But they are low volume VM's and if i could i would probably have ran them on a atom as well.

The zentyal webinterface is probably going to be slow as hell tho, but that only happens if you log in. If the system boots and just starts iptables, really not that much is needed.
Sure faster hardware is better, and you can get an i3 or i5 at very low costs, but things aren't as bad as you say.
However since the low costs of cheap i3 and i5 models, and the much higher performance they get compared to atoms, one should really ask them self if it's worth the (little) money saved to go for atom.

edit: spelling

[Karl]

I just built my home Zentyal server recently.  I don't have the part numbers in front of me at the moment, but it's an Intel Core i3, 8GB DDR3 (mainly for future use, the system only currently uses about 1GB), the motherboard has an Intel H67 chipset with USB3, SATA 6Gbps, etc.  It has no CD/DVD since I just installed the OS from a flash drive.  The two hard drives are ones I had lying around, a 60GB solid state and a 120GB laptop hard drive.  The OS is all on the SSD so the other one can spin down, although it only uses about 2 watts spinning idle.  Part of my decision to get the i3 and so much RAM was so I could properly leverage it as a hypervisor later on.

Keep in mind, even though they're "modern" CPUs, I'm told the Intel Atoms have Pentium 4 levels of processing power.  While that may be fine with an idle load, you may not be as able to leverage the system for bigger and better things down the road.  I wasn't OK with that.  If I decide tomorrow that I want it to throw in virtual machines, RADIUS, and a Minecraft server, I want it to be up to the task.

My system idles at ~35 watts which will run about $2.11/mo here.  It's cool and quiet.  The 140mm fan in the top of the case feels like it's blowing cold air.  Currently I use it as my gateway, replacing a cheap wireless router that didn't handle the white noise of the internet as well as I'd have liked.  It can pass my full 50Mbps cable bandwidth.  It's primarily performing firewall, DNS, DHCP, and HTTP proxy with antivirus and ad-blocking.  I'll be using the VPN later.  I also set it up with deluged to schedule downloads of Ubuntu ISOs and such during off-peak hours when my bandwidth isn't metered.  Security-wise, I've done a port scan and general vulnerability check on my WAN interface.  The thing is like a ghost.  I did have to manually set up ip6tables.  I was concerned about getting blindsided when my ISP decides to turn on native IPv6 one day with no notice, so I wanted to make sure it was firewalled since Zentyal doesn't support IPv6 yet.

I didn't use the Zentyal installer because I didn't want the GUI on it, so I installed Ubuntu and then added Zentyal.  Looking forward to upgrading to Ubuntu 12.04 and Zentyal 2.3 at the end of the month.  So far I've been very pleased with my setup.

[pout]

Try the HP Proliant Microserver N40L we use the N36 and N40 for small businesses and they run really good. They are cheap (249 euro) have a TII N40L, 2GB, 250GB. Buy a other 250GB drive and 2 big 1 or 2TB disks and you have a great server for a low price with low power consumption. If u buy a pci-e 1Gbit network adapter you even have a great gateway.

Have you ever used a HP Proliant Microserver N40L for zentyal-office for 5 to 10 clients? Can Zentyal use the onboard-Raid?

[christian]

I'm running Zentyal on this (very nice) micro server and I'm more than happy with it (for 4 to 6 heavy home users).
8Gb of memory, additional network card, SSD for system but I'm not using onboard raid.
I plan to migrate my current OpenMediaVault server on similar platform soon, still notusing onboard raid 

[pout]

Do you use it only as a gateway or (also) for Zarafa and Filesharing? Do you use a Software Raid or would it slow down the system much?