They always crop up, we mostly ignore them, until we go about trying buy a new server of your own... not as easy as it looks!
Following is a summary of about a weeks worth of going through forums, docs, FAQ's in a variety of places trying to figure out what server to specify for a medium size office. Many thanks to everyone who has posted specs of servers they use successfully - it's a big help.
Yes, the place to start is
http://smeserver.sourceforge.net/sme70/manual#h72-1But this tells you:
"We expect that all hardware which is marked as Certified or Compatible for RedHat Enterprise Linux Update 2 ... will function correctly with SME Server 7.0"
( For reference the RedHat Hardware Compatibility web site, is located at:
https://hardware.redhat.com/hwcert/ )
Elsewhere in the forums, however, someone advises that "SME7 is Centos 4.2 (a port of RHEL 4) so you could search your hardware in HCL (hardware compatibility list) of RHEL4 or CentOS 4.2" (
http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=31647.0)
Can anyone give a definitive answer for SME7: RHEL2 or RHEL4??
Meantime, I followed up both routes. Having done a few general prices comparisons between similarly spec'd Dell and HP servers, I decided to go with the Dell brand as they were coming in slightly cheaper, were more compact, didn't include SCSI adapters I didn't need and seem to be quite popular amongst SME users. (I've also had great experience with Compaq/HP ML350 series in past btw, am not promoting either brand here.)
My points is, the RHEL2 certified list refers to the following PowerEdge Dell servers as being compatible: DELL PowerEdge servers: 2650, 1650, 6650, 4600, 6600. But searching for any of them of the Dell website only lists spare parts, presumably these servers are discontinued.
Going through the RHEL4 list, reveals Dell PowerEdge servers: SC430, 830 and 850. Again none are listed as available, though searches on 830 and 840 give results for the PowerEdge 840 and 860 respectively. You might think they were equivalent but.... it's a lot of money to be mistaken!
Further searching across contribs reveal contrib contributors using (more or less successfully) the following additional Dell PowerEdge servers: SC420, SC430 SATA, 500SC, 750, 800, 1420SC, 2400, 2800, 4200, 4400, 6350 (might not be an exhaustive search but wide). Once again, none of them are current models and not available on Dell's website.
For reference (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong) my summary reading of the issues around dual-core CPU's and SATA hard drives is that both *are* supported in SME7.
Will let you all know what I finally end up with... hopefully this post will be handy for anyone looking out for second hand servers.
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