Got donated 4 servers
 

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.

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.

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

Use the best single server and save the power bill.

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.

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.