At the moment we have no central "dev" server. Two developers (including myself) work with local copies of the database and XAMP installs on our Windows machines (we are using Git for version control).
The idea of the dev server is to have the cloest environment possible to the production machine. The dev server will be located in our office.
Our production server has the following spec:
- DELL PowerEdge R710 Linux
- Dual Socket Quad Core Intel Xeon L5520 2.26GHz
- 12 GB RAM
- 146GB SAS 15K RPM Drive, HDD RPM: 15000, GB Hard Drive x 4 in RAID 10
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 - 64 bit
- PHP, MySQL
I only want to spent a few hundred pounds, so the same server is out of the question... but what are the minimum requirements to run the same environment?
I have heard that Centos is the closest free option to RHEL. Must the motherboard be 64bit to run a 64bit operating system? Do I really need raided disks?
Can I get away with buying a cheap desktop PC and installing Centos on it?