IIS Specifications for Intranet

[Beesknees]

I'm new to IIS and am setting up the Intranet for my company. it will run SQL Server, about 5 business applications, process I would say roughly 4-5000 asp pages per hour and about 40000 html pages per hour. The firm has about 400 employees all regularly accessing the Intranet across across a LAN and about 200 accessing the Intranet over a WAN.

We already have one with 8gb hard drive and 1g ram and it hardly gets hit but still runs at about 1/2 capacity.

What I would like to know is how can I go about planning what spec we should buy a server at?
What tools can I use to monitor how much load it is processing?
TIA (|>

 

[Ragol1]

First of all you need to decide if you need a redundent server for back up and is your server also a mail server/dns server? maybe a RAS server.
is it running active directory?
4-5000 hits a hour is really nothing for windows2000 it can handle that well.
What you really need to figure out is what else the server will be doing if its just going to be a web server then depending on how much data you are storing im sure you would be fine with about a 20gb you want to make sure you get a fast drive and and a M/B to run at ultra 100 "I have heard that they have released boards and drives that run at ultra 133 but have yet to see one" You may want to look at a board with RAID on it and put a second drive in for back up that way if one goes down the other will take over.
The same applies for CPU's you may want a dual CPU board.
This really depends how much money you have to spend and how important your data is.
As far as CPU speed you would want to go as fast as you can as they bring out a new cpu every month and they soon get outdated maybe a 1.8 p4 or AMD has just released there new XP 1500,1600,1700,1800 series which are nice.
I could go on and on hope this helps point you in the right direction.

Nick
A+ MCP

 

[Galrahn]

For production work in a company, you want a real server.

Unsure who you typically purchase your hardware from, but the type of system your looking for compares to either of the following.

Check out DELL Poweresge 2550 series servers with Hardware Raid cards. Not sure of the price on these guys..

or

Check out the HP lp2000r Netserver series servers with Hardware RAID cards. I know the lp2000r Netserver runs around $5000, but provides the type of performance and scalability you will need when running web based applications connected to backend data services like SQl/Oracle.

Hardware RAID is what you want though, whether you use mirror or stripe sets, the performance aspect is what you want. Both servers support up to 6 hard drives, I recommend at least 2 so you can mirror and stay up 24/7 regardless of a HD failure, although on my web servers I like to run the system partition on a mirrored pair of drives, and the data (asp pages ect.) on a four drive RAID 5 set. This guarentees the performance and reliablity you need for production systems, and Hard drives are not that expensive.

Galrahn
galrahn@galrahn.com

 

[Beesknees]

Sounds like I'm in over my head. I do need to do something about our IIS soon so I guess will get the networks backing for this.
To present a business case for new equipment I think i'll need to prove some stats. What tools would you suggest I use to monitor the activity. I think specifically ASP pages and HTML pages, connections, memory usage and anything that may be relevant. thanks.

 

[Galrahn]

For buisness monitoring, monitor the server as well as IIS. One of the most important logs for IIS monitoring when relating to buisness practice is users, total number of users connected to IIS during peak times specifically. If a large % of your organization is utilizing this specific web server, then the rest of the performance statistics are secondary, as the primary goal should be creating an enviornment that provides stability for corporate usage. This allows you to tell your business managers that this server is used by x% of our corporation users, making this a critical piece of hardware for our corporation.

Performance counters may need to be tweaked to find the right counters for your enviornment, but I would start by monitoring hard drive read/writes, processor, IIS coutners, ASP counters, and network counters to and from the database through IIS. Alot of dynamic content can task the paging file, physical memory, disk cache, and processor specifically, and that would be the ASP alone.

Remember, no matter what you may read, performance monitoring ends up being more of an art than a science when using numbers for buisness purposes, management wants to see something that they understand, not a bunch of technical statistics that goes over thier head.

Good luck and I hope I haven't made a bad day for you, using perfmon is tricky business but gets easy with practice. Good practice is to run it from a remote desktop station and not on the server itself, makes for more credible numbers of what is actually happening.

Galrahn
galrahn@galrahn.com