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Sever configuration recommendation
- Thread starter ben1876
- Start date
With 60 users and all those services, the big thing is going to be disk throughput. Start by measuring reads, writes, and I/O tranactions per second with perfmon to get a baseline. Baselines on CPU and network utilization would also be useful.
Once you have the data, figure out how many disks you need to handle the I/O load. A single 10K rpm spindle can handle about 100 I/O per second. RAID 1 has much better write performance than RAID 5. A simple mirror has write performance of about 100 I/O per second, and a four drive RAID 5 has a write performance of about 75 using the 10K drives cited above. For the same number of spindles, RAID 1 is only slightly better than RAID 5 on reads.
With this said, the 1650 and 1750 SC can house 3 drives. The 2650 can hold 5. The 2600 can hold six. You probably want to stay with the internal drives to avoid the expense of an external enclosure like the PV220.
Once you have the data, figure out how many disks you need to handle the I/O load. A single 10K rpm spindle can handle about 100 I/O per second. RAID 1 has much better write performance than RAID 5. A simple mirror has write performance of about 100 I/O per second, and a four drive RAID 5 has a write performance of about 75 using the 10K drives cited above. For the same number of spindles, RAID 1 is only slightly better than RAID 5 on reads.
With this said, the 1650 and 1750 SC can house 3 drives. The 2650 can hold 5. The 2600 can hold six. You probably want to stay with the internal drives to avoid the expense of an external enclosure like the PV220.
NickFerrar
MIS
Pretty tough to answer really as SQL useage can vary dramatically depending on the front-end app.
Personally I'd say a PE2600, maybe dual CPU (in the UK at least Dell have free second CPU offers running), at least 1GB RAM, disks depend on data storage requirements and budget 3x36GB 15k's would be a good start if you can afford them, 10k's aren't much worse though. I'd also get a DLT1 or LTO-1 tape drive (depending on data volume) unless you do backups centrally.
Bought a similar system here last week (to run an Oracle back-end though) and it was about £3750, probably a lot cheaper in the US.
I hope there's already a DC for this domain to - if not you really should spec. one, having just one DC in a domain is asking for trouble.
Personally I'd say a PE2600, maybe dual CPU (in the UK at least Dell have free second CPU offers running), at least 1GB RAM, disks depend on data storage requirements and budget 3x36GB 15k's would be a good start if you can afford them, 10k's aren't much worse though. I'd also get a DLT1 or LTO-1 tape drive (depending on data volume) unless you do backups centrally.
Bought a similar system here last week (to run an Oracle back-end though) and it was about £3750, probably a lot cheaper in the US.
I hope there's already a DC for this domain to - if not you really should spec. one, having just one DC in a domain is asking for trouble.
- Thread starter
- #4
Than you both. Here is more info on our current setup. We have one Dell box 1400SC I think, that has 4 hard drives, RAID 5. 512 RAM. is a member server and has Exchange 2000 and is also file server, and DHCP. Used to be DC, and AD, but after it crashed and re-install, is not promoted. the 2nd server is Gateway 7400 box. It runs SQL back end, DC, AD,GC, print server. It has only one hard drive and we back up the production database and write it to the DEll box that has DAT tape drive and gets backed up every night. The 3rd server is just a dell desktop box that has w2k and ISA 2000 on it and acts as firewall. now, my problem is that gateway reboots every morning around 5 am and want to replace it with a new Dell box. Your recommendations is aappreciated? again I need to give this proposal to the client and budget is tight for them.
NickFerrar
MIS
What is writing to the SQL database though? SQL aside a PE1750, 1 2.4GHz Xeon, 512MB RAM and a 2x36GB mirror is fine but the SQL part could have a big impact on what you'd need.
As a rough guideline I keep in mind the following when specing a server:
1). 1 CPU is enough unless it's running multiple apps or the app itself is multi-CPU optimised and performance is critical.
2). For file and app servers I generally use RAID5
3). For DC's I use RAID1
4). For file/app servers I spec. 1GB minimum (more if the application is a known memory-hog).
5). For DC's I spec 512MB (they can struggle a bit in 256MB in my experience).
6). For dedicated DC's we spec bronze support
7). For file/app servers we spec 24x7 silver support
8). If the server will hold 20GB+ of data we'll spec a tape drive and back it up locally, otherwise it will get backed up to another server.
However when it comes to new apps, especially those with backend Oracle/SQL databases you need to investifate vendor recommendations and talk to their pre-sales people about realistic specs (most minimum required spec lists are whoefully inadequate in the real world).
If it runs fine now on your Gateway box and that only has a single CPU and 512-1GB RAM then stick with that spec.
As a rough guideline I keep in mind the following when specing a server:
1). 1 CPU is enough unless it's running multiple apps or the app itself is multi-CPU optimised and performance is critical.
2). For file and app servers I generally use RAID5
3). For DC's I use RAID1
4). For file/app servers I spec. 1GB minimum (more if the application is a known memory-hog).
5). For DC's I spec 512MB (they can struggle a bit in 256MB in my experience).
6). For dedicated DC's we spec bronze support
7). For file/app servers we spec 24x7 silver support
8). If the server will hold 20GB+ of data we'll spec a tape drive and back it up locally, otherwise it will get backed up to another server.
However when it comes to new apps, especially those with backend Oracle/SQL databases you need to investifate vendor recommendations and talk to their pre-sales people about realistic specs (most minimum required spec lists are whoefully inadequate in the real world).
If it runs fine now on your Gateway box and that only has a single CPU and 512-1GB RAM then stick with that spec.
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