Server Recommendations for Casper Distribution and Netbooting

[rcantrell]

Hello Jamf Nation,

I've just recently become the Systems Admin of the school district I work in. I was recently tasked with coming up with suggestions for replacing the our school servers with something "new". We currently only need a single ESXi host to serve Netsus Netboot server and a Casper Distribution server. We have gigabit networks in our schools for file transfers.

The busiest time for our servers is during the summer where the school technicians will re-image laptops up to 15-20 at a time. Our distribution points are using ~120 GBs of space for packages at this time. I don't expect this to grow very fast at all in the future.

I'm hoping you guys could recommend a solution that can maximize data transfer for imaging, have some sort of redundancy for protection, and is affordable for a public school system.

I'm totally okay with refurbished gear that comes with a 3-5 year warranty. I've looked at hardware here.

Any information would very appreciative.

Thanks,
Roger

[psliequ]

You might consider a refurbished Mac Pro (which ESX is supported on) with lots of external thunderbolt storage for your package repositories.

[kaira22]

Tower Server Opt for this

[markanderson]

Tower Server is the best option for this. A tower server is robust & simple in nature. As overall component density is low. Easier cooling is also possible in tower servers. Therefore, it can prevent possible damage, overheating, or downtime. Do your own search to know more about tower servers.