They can't spent money on hrdware of servers and their maintainance and it's infrastructure.
jtd wrote: Actually you can use any amd 64 mobo with sata drive and sufficient ram. The drives are quite fast. If the files the clients write are more than 2 MB use jfs else use reiserfs. Use one machine with reiserfs for dhcp + nfs boot, one with jfs for application serving and one more with reiserfs for /home.
I have tried this with using ext3 partition, but I got lot issue with CPU utilization (waiting for io was more because of NFS). So I didnot seperate it.
Your client machines will use their own local ram and X resources while executing. This drastically cuts the server requirements but "increases" the need for better capability clients - celeron 800 or better. However given that the cheapest mobo u can buy now is a via cle clients should not be a problem.
They have computers which are donated by people so I can't say that they will buy new 50 systems or not. Maximum client systems are i386 with Pentium 1 and 64 MB RAM. I used bootROM to boot them.
There are max 50 PCs on one server. Instead of one server I want to use normal PCs approx 2-3 by doing clustering. I have heard about google. They have used normall PCs with cluster.
The "normal" pcs are 64 bit systems with hughe ram and gigabit networks connected to massive storage arrays. By normal they mean high performance of the shelf components.
I wanted to say that Google use n number of normal i386 systems of Pentium 1 or Celeron with 1 GB RAM instead of 1 big server.
1. Purpose of the old Windows machinesThey were using old windows machines for Excel, Word,
not a problem
Tally,
may work with wine or freedos.
We are running Tally7.2 Linux version on Server so noissue with that. But it eats up lot memory (Near about 50MB per instance).
group similiar hardware and describe each group in detail. If you have wildly varying hardware, your nfsboot will be difficult to maintain. If you want to use local resources you need 256MB ram
Yes they have widely varying hardware as all PCs are donated by people. But almost 90% PCs are Pentium 1 with 64 MB RAM. And currently I am booting up them with LTSP-4.2. So no problem in thinclient system.
But is it possible to get collective output of n number of PCs ? For example: If my server requirement is 3 GB RAM and 3 Ghz CPU. Then instead of bying one server of that much capacity, can I use 3 i386/586 PCs each of 1 GB RAM and 1 Ghz CPU ?
Regards NeeleshG