Advice on server specs

Mr.Clark

Mr.Clark

Mr.Clark

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13 Jun 2005
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I've been asked to spec out some new servers - 2 domain controllers and a set for Network Access Protection

For the DCs, I've looked at Dell's R200s, with not a huge amount of CPU, RAM or disk, coming in at under £700 each.

For NAP, I'm looking at running a PowerEdge 2950 with the Policy Server, Health Server and Enforcement Server running as separate VMs, possibly under HyperV. Also possibly another VM running a WSUS child and Trend AV updates for the NAP non-compliant clients.

I specced up a fairly chunky box with a 2.8GHz quad Xeon, 12 or 16GB RAM, 4 or 6 450GB drives in RAID5 coming in at around the £4k mark.


Do these sound reasonable? We've got a Select agreement, so will get the OSes separate (Server 2008 Enterprise, probably) for not a huge amount.

I'll be having discussions with the guys, but jsut want to sanity check my selections before I do, in case I've done something glaringly obviously dull.

Thanks :)
 
Personally I'd look at an R710 (if you're set on Dell)

Any reason not to scrap the R200s and virtualise the DCs?
 
I don't think I could sell that to the guys - we'd need 2 VM boxes running a DC each, plus the NAP VMs in their own little DHCP area... it seems overly complex.

What makes the R710 better than the 2950? It seems higher priced for an equivalent spec.
 
I'd be pretty confident that the one box could run both DCs and your security services. Or buy one R200 and one R710, run one physical DC and one virtual. £700's a lot for a DC...

The R710 has the new Nehalem processors, so you'll get better performance for your money. Dell are going to want to be shifting their old 2950/2970 stock so there's probably room for bigger discounts there
 
Having both DCs on the same box would be unwise, as they'd be the only 2 in the domain (we're doing a new one).

I'll ask about having a virtual DC - can HyperV allow you to do a Physical-to-Virtual? Being able to create one DC and clone it into a VM would be quite nifty.

Dell need to work on their marketing... I couldn't see any differences between the Xeons. Model numbers mean nothing, I'm not ujp on desktop chips atm, let alone server ones.


Thanks for this, I'll see how the meetings go
 
Dont know about hyper-V but with VMWare you can do P2V easily (I'd run ESXi myself TBH)

If you're talking about cloning it in order to run it alongside (rather than migrating to virtual), this would be an incredibly bad idea with a DC. Doesnt take long to DCpromo a new installation
 
Reconsider your disk setup maybe, RAID5 is not going give you brilliant performance for VMs. You should be able to put enough drives in to run RAID10 in that box...
 
Get 8 drives in the R710 in RAID10... We bought an R710 to test for less than an equivalent spec 2950.

R200s are good little machines, but with quad cores, 4GB of RAM you should be able to get the price down a little to £500-£600. As said, see if you can get an account manager!
 
that said, we have about 20 2950's of varying specs running exchange, sql, ibm->sql processes, terminal services, file/print clusters, IIS/FTP, DC etc etc and they never miss a beat. pretty robust twin socket machines imo.
 
Yeah the 2950s are superb - but we just couldn't turn down 16 threads as well as the quad gigabit network ports on the R710 for testing. These are going to be amazing for virtualization. :D
 
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