Chapter 3 – Servers

Unlike a workstation, which is dedicated to a single customer, multiple customers depend on a server.
Therefore, reli- ability and uptime are a high priority. A server may have hundreds, thousands, or
millions of clients relying on it. Every effort to increase performance or reliability is amortized over many
clients. Servers are expected to last longer than workstations, which also justifies the additional cost.
Purchasing a server with spare capacity becomes an investment in extending its life span.

Handout Summary:

The Basics

1. Buy Server Hardware for Servers

a. Extensibility
b. More CPU Performance
c. High Performance I/O
d. Upgrade Options
e. Rack Mountable
f. No side-access needs
g. High availability options
h. Maintenance contracts
i. Management options
2. Choose vendors known for reliable products
3. Understand the cost of Server Hardware
4. Consider Maintenance Contracts and Spare Parts
a. Non-critical servers
b. Large groups of similar servers
c. Controlled introduction
d. Critical host
e. Large variety of models from same vendor
f. Highly critical host
5. Maintaining Data Integrity
6. Put servers in data centers
7. Client Server OS Configuration
8. Provide Remote control access
9. Mirror Boot Disks

Enhancing Reliability and Service Availability

1. Server Appliances
2. Redundant Power Supplies
3. Full versus n+1 Redundancy
4. Hot-swap components
5. Separate networks for administrative functions
6. Alternative: Inexpensive Servers
Features of a Reliable Server:

● Shorter Repair Time

● Provide better working

environment

● Use special care in the

configuration process

The Basics:

1. Buy Server Hardware for Servers - Systems sold as servers are different from systems sold to be
clients or desktop workstations. It is often tempting to “save money” by purchasing desktop
hardware and loading it with server software. Doing so may work in the short term but is not the
best choice for the long term or in a large installation you would be building a house of cards.
Server hardware usually costs more but has additional features that justify the cost. Some of the
features are the following:

a. Extensibility – Provision of hardware/software configurations enabling clustering, load-

balancing, automated fail-over, and similar capabilities by providing more physical space
for additional hard drives, more slots for cards and CPUs.
b. More CPU Performance – Servers often have multiple CPUs and advanced hardware
features such as pre-fetch, multi-stage processor checking, and the ability to dynamically
allocate resources among CPUs. Because a server is expected to last longer, it is often
reasonable to get a faster CPU that will not become obsolete as quickly. Note that CPU
speed on a server does not always determine performance, because many applications
are I/O-bound, not CPU-bound.
c. High Performance I/O - Servers usually do more I/O than clients. The quantity of I/O is
often proportional to the number of clients, which justifies a faster I/O subsystem.
d. Upgrade Options - Servers are often upgraded, rather than simply replaced; they are
designed for growth. Servers generally have the ability to add CPUs or replace
individual CPUs with faster ones, without requiring additional hardware changes.
e. Rack mountable – Servers should be rack-mountable as opposed to stacking them. More
importantly, the server should be engineered for cooling and ventilation in a rack-
mounted setting. Connectors should support a rack-mount environment such as use of
cat-5 patch cables for serial console rather than db-9 connectors with screws.
f. No side-access needs - A rack-mounted host is easier to repair or perform maintenance
on if tasks can be done while it remains in the rack. Such tasks must be performed
without access to the sides of the machine. All cables should be on the back, and all drive
bays should be on the front.
g. High availability options – Many servers include various high-availability options, such
as dual power supplies, RAID, multiple network connections, and hot-swap components.
h. Maintenance Contracts – Vendors offer server hardware service contracts that generally
include guaranteed turnaround times on replacement parts.
2. Choose Vendors Known for Reliable Products - It is important to pick vendors that are known
for reliability. Some vendors cut corners by using consumer-grade parts; other vendors use parts
that meet MILSPEC requirements. It can be useful to talk with other SAs to find out which
vendors they use and which ones they avoid. The System Administrators’ Guild (SAGE)
(www.sage.org) and the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) (www.
lopsa.org) are good resources for the SA community. Environments can be homogeneous—all
the same vendor or product line—or heterogeneous—many different vendors and/or product
lines.
a. Homogeneous environments are easier to maintain, because training is reduced,
maintenance and repairs are easier—one set of spares—and there is less finger pointing
when problems arise.
b. Heterogeneous environments have the benefit that you are not locked in to one vendor,
and the competition among the vendors will result in better service to you.

3. Understand the cost of the Server Hardware - To understand the additional cost of servers, you
must understand how machines are priced. You also need to understand how server features add
to the cost of the machine. Most vendors have three2 product lines: home, business, and server.
a. Home Line – The home line is usually the cheapest initial purchase price, because
consumers tend to make purchasing decisions based on the advertised price. Add-ons
and future expandability are available at a higher cost
b. Business Line – The business desktop line tends to focus on total cost of ownership. The
initial purchase price is higher than for a home machine, but the business line should
take longer to become obsolete.
c. Server Line - Servers cost more for other reasons, too. A chassis that is easier to service
may be more expensive to manufacture. Restricting the drive bays and other access
panels to certain sides means not positioning them solely to minimize material costs.
However, the small increase in initial purchase price saves money in the long term in
mean time to repair (MTTR) and ease of service.
4. Consider Maintenance Contract and Spare parts - When purchasing a server, consider how
repairs will be handled. All machines eventually break. Vendors tend to have a variety of
maintenance contract options. Following are some reasonable scenarios for picking appropriate
maintenance contracts:
a. Non-Critical Servers – Some hosts are not critical, such as a CPU server that is one of
many. In that situation, a maintenance contract with next-day or 2-day response time is
reasonable. Or, no contract may be needed if the default repair options are sufficient.
b. Large group of similar servers - Sometimes, a site has many of the same type of machine,
possibly offering different kinds of services. In this case, it may be reasonable to purchase
a spares kit so that repairs can be done by local staff. The cost of the spares kit is divided
over the many hosts. These hosts may now require a lower-cost maintenance contract
that simply replaces parts from the spares kit.
c. Controlled Introduction - Technology improves over time, and sites described in the
previous paragraph eventually need to upgrade to newer models, which may be out of
scope for the spares kit. In this case, you might standardize for a set amount of time on a
particular model or set of models that share a spares kit. At the end of the period, you
might approve a new model and purchase the appropriate spares kit. At any given time,
you would have, for example, only two spares kits. To introduce a third model, you
would first decommission all the hosts that rely on the spares kit that is being retired.
This controls costs.
d. Critical Hosts - Sometimes, it is too expensive to have a fully stocked spares kit. It may
be reasonable to stock spares for parts that commonly fail and otherwise pay for a
 maintenance contract with same-day response. Hard drives and power supplies
commonly fail and are often interchangeable among a number of products.
e. Large variety of models from same vendor – A very large site may adopt a maintenance
contract that includes having an on-site technician. This option is usually justified only at
a site that has an extremely large number of servers, or sites where that vendor’s servers
play a keen role related to revenue.
f. Highly critical host - Some vendors offer a maintenance contract that provides an on-site
technician and a duplicate machine ready to be swapped into place. This is often as
expensive as paying for a redundant server but may make sense for some companies that
are not highly technical.

5. Maintaining Data Integrity - Servers have critical data and unique configurations that must be
protected. Workstation clients are usually mass-produced with the same configuration on each
one, and usually store their data on servers, which eliminates the need for backups. If a
workstation’s disk fails, the configuration should be identical to its multiple cousins, unmodified
from its initial state, and therefore can be recreated from an automated install procedure. That is
the theory. However, people will always store some data on their local machines, software will be
installed locally, and OSs will store some configuration data locally. It is impossible to prevent
this on Windows platforms. Roaming profiles store the users’ settings to the server every time
they log out but do not protect the locally installed software and registry settings of the
machine.

6. Put Servers in Data centers - Servers should be installed in an environment with proper power,
fire protection, networking, cooling, and physical security. It is a good idea to allocate the
physical space of a server when it is being purchased. Marking the space by taping a paper sign
in the appropriate rack can safe- guard against having space double-booked. Marking the power
and cooling space requires tracking via a list or spreadsheet.

7. Client Server OS Configuration - Servers don’t have to run the same OS as their clients. Servers
can be completely different, completely the same, or the same basic OS but with a different
configuration to account for the difference in intended usage. Each is appropriate at different
times. Sometimes, a server is required to have all the same software as the clients. Consider the
case of a UNIX environment with many UNIX desktops and a series of general-purpose UNIX
CPU servers.

8. Provide Remote Control access - Servers need to be maintained remotely. When purchasing
server hardware, one of your major considerations should be what kind of remote access to the
console is available and determining which tasks require such access. In an emergency, it isn’t
reasonable or timely to expect SAs to travel to the physical device to perform their work. In
nonemergency situations, an SA should be able to fix at least minor problems from home or on
the road and, optimally, be fully productive remotely when telecommuting. A KVM switch is a
device that lets many machines share a single key- board, video screen, and mouse (KVM). The
predecessor to KVM switches were for serial port–based devices. Originally, servers had no video
card but instead had a serial port to which one attached an terminal.

9. Mirror Boot Disks - The boot disk, or disk with the operating system, is often the most difficult
one to replace if it gets damaged, so we need special precautions to make recovery faster. The
boot disk of any server should be mirrored. That is, two disks are installed, and any update to
one is also done to the other. If one disk fails, the system automatically switches to the working
disk.

Enhancing Reliability and Ability

1. Server Appliances - A server appliance brings years of experience together in one box.
Architecting a server is difficult. The physical hardware for a server has all the requirements
listed earlier in this chapter, as well as the system engineering and performance tuning that only
a highly experienced expert can do. The software required to provide a service often involves
assembling various pack- ages, gluing them together, and providing a single, unified
administration system for it all. It’s a lot of work! Appliances do all this for you right out of the
box.

2. Redundant Power Supplies - After hard drives, the next most failure-prone component of a
system is the power supply. So, ideally, servers should have redundant power supplies. Having a
redundant power supply does not simply mean that two such devices are in the chassis. It means
that the system can be operational if one power supply is not functioning: n+1 redundancy.
Sometimes, a fully loaded system requires two power supplies to receive enough power. In this
case, redundant means having three power supplies.

3. Full vs n+1 Redundancy - By contrast, in full redundancy, two complete sets of hardware are
linked by a fail-over configuration. The first system is performing a service and the second
system sits idle, waiting to take over in case the first one fails. This failover might happen
manually—someone notices that the first system failed and activates the second system—or
automatically—the second system monitors the first system and activates itself (if it has
determined that the first one is unavailable). Other fully redundant systems are load sharing.
Both systems are fully operational and both share in the service workload. Each server has
enough capacity to handle the entire service workload of the other. When one system fails, the
other system takes on its failed counterpart’s workload. The systems may be configured to
monitor each other’s reliability, or some external resource may control the flow and allocation of
service requests. When n is 2 or more, n + 1 is cheaper than full redundancy. Customers often
prefer it for the economical advantage. Usually, only server-specific subsystems are n + 1
redundant, rather than the entire set of components. Always pay particular attention when a
vendor tries to sell you on n + 1 redundancy but only parts of the system are redundant: A car
with extra tires isn’t useful if its engine is dead.

4. Hot-swap components - Redundant components should be hot-swappable. Hot-swap refers to

the ability to remove and replace a component while the system is running. Normally, parts
should be removed and replaced only when the system is powered off. Being able to hot-swap
components is like being able to change a tire while the car is driving down a highway. It’s great
not to have to stop to fix common problems.

5. Separate networks for administrative functions - Additional network interfaces in servers

permit you to build separate administrative networks. For example, it is common to have a
separate network for backups and monitoring. Backups use significant amounts of bandwidth
when they run, and separating that traffic from the main network means that backups won’t
adversely affect customers’ use of the network. This separate network can be engineered using
simpler equipment and thus be more reliable or, more important, be unaffected by outages in the
main network. It also provides a way for SAs to get to the machine during such an outage. This
form of redundancy solves a very specific problem.

6. An Alternative: Many Inexpensive Servers - Although this chapter recommends paying more
for server-grade hardware because the extra performance and reliability are worthwhile, a
growing counterargument says that it is better to use many replicated cheap servers that will fail
more often. If you are doing a good job of managing failures, this strategy is more cost-effective.

Group Activity # 3
Instructions: Create a multi-service platform in a network and virtualized environment through the ff:

1. Setup the computing environment using a type 2 hypervisor

2. Install CentOS7 as a Server VM
3. Install Ubuntu LTS as a Client VM
4. Setup the OS Services in the Server
a. Install LAMP
b. Setup a simple PHP Site
c. Setup the NFS/CFS
d. Setup the domain

Select your Hardware Components for your server and fill up the table below:

1. Web Server
2. File Server

Hardware Specifications
Vendor Name
Device Model (if applicable)
Cost per 1 deployment
Special Features
Instructions: Create a multi-service platform in a network and virtualized environment through the ff:

Setup the computing environment using a type 2 hypervisor

1. Install CentOS7 as a Server VM
2. Install Ubuntu LTS as a Client VM
3. Setup the OS Services in the Server
4. Install LAMP
5. Setup a simple PHP Site
6. Setup the NFS/CFS
7. Setup the domain

Useful Links

How to Setup Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) stack

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-linux-apache-mysql-php-lamp-stack-on-
centos-7

How to Setup NFS in CentOS 7

https://www.itzgeek.com/how-tos/linux/centos-how-tos/how-to-setup-nfs-server-on-centos-7-rhel-7-
fedora-22.html

How to Setup Domain(BIND) Server in CentOS7

https://www.itzgeek.com/how-tos/linux/centos-how-tos/configure-dns-bind-server-on-centos-7-rhel-7.html

Select your Hardware Components for your server and fill up the table indicated in the attached PDF (last
page)