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Comment by wglb | Hacker News Reader

I use the following in my home setup: 16 ubuntu machines, 3 OpenBSD machines, 1 freebsd, 8 centos (one headnode, 7 diskless compute nodes) 2 osx, 1 windows (oops-two; wife's laptop). Several of these are old recycled boxes, but every one of these has a job.

In retrospect, I wish I had done 8 of the ubuntu servers as freebsd.

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Uhh, do you live in a server farm :) ?

You might call it that. Not very pretty, but workhorses are 64 bit athalons, some dual core, low cost.

I used to live like you, but with the onset of virtualization dramatically reduced my power consumption and green footprint with Xen and VMWare.

Well, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=887779

It must be hot in there!!

That long list of machines leads me towards two questions:

1. What are you using them all for?

2. Vertical or horizontal?

1. My startup project 2. Not sure what you mean. No database involved, logic boxes each have different function, cluster is strictly compute.

"Horizontal" means a bunch of servers on a shelf. "Vertical" means a bunch of servers in a rack. :-)

Restaurant racks, cheap cases, multiple levels. No actual server rack. One pair of servers in fact has no case at all, sits on hollow core door.

Are they all physical machines? Or VM's? Surely you could virtualise all of these on 1-3 physical hosts?

I'm curious as well, but about your suggestion: what fun would that be?

Well vm won't work as they are all 100% or 200% cpu when working.

Sounds like a beautiful setup. What is your electricity bill like? ;)

Not really all that bad. Policy is to not buy the leading-edge stuff, so they don't consume as much power as say, an opteron would.

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