Building Server For a Small Business

[rman215]

Hello,

We are trying to build a server for a small business without breaking the bank. I have built several pc's before but am a little out of my realm when it comes to building a server. To get an idea of what hardware we need I'll give a quick overview of how the server will interact in the business environment.

We currently have Microsoft Great Plains that manages purchasing/orders and SQL database connections. From what I can tell it takes a lot of memory and hard drive space. This computer is running windows server 2008.

On another machine we have copy of windows server running our domain controller and dns server.

Then we have a Windows 7 machine acting as print server for invoices and what not.

What I would like to do is have everything running from one single server (Domain Controller, Database, Fileshare, Print Server) I have heard this is possible to do with vmware and multiple NIC cards.

I would like to build the server myself. So if you have any experience building a server like this please share your parts and build process.


Thanks!

 

[davidarad02]

something like a xeon 1231 v3 and some badass hard drives can do the trick. do you have a budget in mind?

 

[rman215]

We would like to spend around (1500 - 2000) on the hardware. The server we currently are running has 2 dual-core xeon processors. However, it's about 10 years old... Is Is there really any need to be running 2 processors for what I am trying to do? Or could I get away with 1 xeon processor? I was think about doing a RAID 5 or 10 configuration. What would be a good choice for the hardware below?

Motherboard
RAM
Tower Case
Power Supply
NIC CARDS
RAID Controller