Got donated 4 servers

[masons]

Hi,

My forum is not very busy, about 35.000 visitors a month and about 20 members online a day. Very little posts (very academic subjects) and online at the same time usually around 20~50 peek at 409.

I got donated 4 servers, just arrived and in the process of planning them out.
I have a dedicated 100mbps in my office and 1 switch.

I like to get some tips on the perfect setup,

Server 1 - apache/fastcgi ? web server
Server 2 - sql server
Server 3 - load balancer
Server 4 - spare

Thats kind of my idea, but I have not experience with doing this, I hope I can get some tips and ideas on how to do this. Which OS to run and which special setups to compile.

[snakes1100]

Server 1 - Nginx proxy / load balancer serving all static content (images, html etc)
Server 2 & 3 - Apache (Run as a DSO)
Server 4 - DB only

Over kill for what you have, but none the less fun to play with.

If any of the servers are raid 10 capable, use it as a db server.

The nginx server can get away with minimal ram in it, give as much ram as you can to the db server as well.

[final kaoss]

Here's what I would do.

Server 1 - Turn into a CDN for images/css/static
Server 2 - Seperate server for Databases & backups
Server 3 - Email Server
Server 4 - Javascript Server

[ImmortalForums]

Use the best single server and save the power bill.

[eva2000]

if it was me, i'd have single web + db server, have remaining 2 servers setup as test server testing os/server tweaks/software etc prior to implementing them on live site. You could have backups off loaded to these 2 servers too and/or setup mysql replication slave to main db server for testing as well.

[benstillman]

Use the best single server and save the power bill.

With 20 users per day, I'd go even further and say don't use any of the servers, and get a $4.99/mo GoDaddy hosting plan. That'll probably be cheaper than powering one server for a month, and definitely less hassle.