New Zealand Mac Mini Hosting

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myfullflavour

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#101824 9-May-2012 18:22

This post is for those who thought (and told us!) you can't host websites on a Mac Mini Server.

An original post here on Geekzone (http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=49&topicid=92674) encouraged me to explore and subsequently write this post this afternoon:

http://www.fullflavourmedia.co.nz/blog/2012/5/9/new-zealand-mac-mini-hosting-colocation/

Hopefully you find it of interest - between Linux, Parallels, Mac Minis and a decent network partner, we've got some pretty unique hosting solutions provisioned for clients right now.

More than happy to do answer questions if anyone has any - happy to share the expertise gained in this field over the past year.

Jesse

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#622440 9-May-2012 19:03

Those 1u mounting trays for mac minis seem to be pretty common:
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/rackmacmini.html

Not sure if I'd be using a mac mini for hosting though... Not exactly infrastructure grade?

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kyhwana2

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#622503 9-May-2012 20:37

Lets see, single disk drive, single PSU, no remote management (IPMI, etc).. expensive. You can pick up 2nd hand 1U servers for less than a mac mini.

freitasm

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#622518 9-May-2012 20:55

Sure, but which one gives you hipster bragging rights? ;-)

myfullflavour

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#622536 9-May-2012 21:16

kyhwana2: Lets see, single disk drive, single PSU, no remote management (IPMI, etc).. expensive. You can pick up 2nd hand 1U servers for less than a mac mini.

We use dual disk versions, RAID1
A good amount of punch for the $$, I'm going to ignore the 2nd hand comment
Use significantly less power and half the space of traditional 1U servers = great long term savings as space and power take up a big chunk of colocation cost
We've got clients finding it a great step between VPS level and higher end dedicated server options
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geocom

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#622554 9-May-2012 21:51

myfullflavour:
kyhwana2: Lets see, single disk drive, single PSU, no remote management (IPMI, etc).. expensive. You can pick up 2nd hand 1U servers for less than a mac mini.

We use dual disk versions, RAID1
A good amount of punch for the $$, I'm going to ignore the 2nd hand comment
Use significantly less power and half the space of traditional 1U servers = great long term savings as space and power take up a big chunk of colocation cost
We've got clients finding it a great step between VPS level and higher end dedicated server options
Hipster cred

Agree with this 100%

1. I have a Mac Mini Server with 2 disks buit in. I use one as the main drive and one as an exact clone of the other that is bootable. So that if one fails there is a fallback.

2. They will be second hand for a reason. On the mac mini the server tools are ~$60 and now os updates are now around ~$40. So for that i get apache, VPN, SFTP, Email etc. Most of the 1U second hand servers i could find on trade me made no mention of any included OS.

3. Have not run out of power yet the and doubt i ever will at the moment i am using only about 35W. The maximum that the mac mini will use is about 85W so this will easily fit into the minimum rage of most colo's which can be a huge saving.

For the size of the mac mini you could fit about 4 maybe 6 into the same space as a normal 1U server or even connect some thunderbolt drives to add even more space at the max speed.

Geoff E

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#622576 9-May-2012 22:11

How much does a Mac mini cost? I can get in 1u a server that has 10x disks, dual power supply and enough CPU power to run 10 or so virtual machines fairly well and only around 40w if power is important.

I honestly just don't see how they stack up over virtualization. A 1u, server yea sure it probably uses more power and doesn't have cool hipster software but it also will likely have the things you need for colocation e.g. redundant cooling, hot swap hard drives, redundant PSUs, IPMI (important if datacentre is far away).

I've got 50+ VMs, some extremely disk/ram/IO heavy running on a 1u server with dual CPU and 64GB RAM. Sure it probably uses more power than 2x Mac mini but I have numerous times over systems running on it.

To be honest while I know it sounds cool and amazing to have those you are better to go with a virtualization platform and offer cloud servers to your customers unless they really, really need Mac OS. If you are really looking at good use of rack space and must have dedicated servers check this out:
http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/MicroCloud.cfm

I notice looking at your rack you have some small cisco router in there. Another thing with virtualization is you can run software based routers. I wonder how that Cisco would fair if you got say a 700mbps DDoS attack? Chuck in some kind of software firewall and it can draw down on how many cores you want to throw at it.

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myfullflavour

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#622592 9-May-2012 22:48

I'm keeping an eye on the heavy virtualization options - so far we've fallen below that category and been comfortable exploring configurations in our niche.

I didn't start this thread to debate MMS vs other options - rather to share the experience and let others (likely OSX users) know that these units can be used in a commercial setting.