Specs for servers..

Street

Street

Street

Soldato
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Well I've finally convinced one of the companies we look after that their servers are in need of upgrading. The are currently running three servers, one DC that also holds the database the company use, one TS server and one Linux server for emails.

The company that looks after the database has done an upgrade and it has made the poor servers grind to a halt. The DC and TS servers are both on Server 2k. They currently have about 25 users, 20 of those connect via thin clients to the TS server and the other 5 use stand alone XP PCs.

The current servers are about 7 years old at least and are beginning to show their age. We have upgraded them to the most they will take but are still running slow and causing issues.

So far I've been looking at Dell servers and have specced up the following..

DC/Database server..
1 x Xeon Quad E5420 2.5GHz
4GB RAM
4 x 74GB 15k SAS drives in RAID 5 ~222GB
Server 2k8 x64
Was going to get a twin socket server so there is room for future upgrade.

TS server..
2 x Xeon Quad E5420 2.5GHz
16GB RAM
5 x 150GB 15k SAS drives in RAID 5 ~600GB
Server 2k8 x64

How do those specs seem? Was wondering about the drive configurations.. Is it worth going for maybe RAID 10 or 6?

Ta for any advice! :)

Andy
 
For databases it's nearly always worth going with raid-10 (unless you have a read-only db). I'd also consider having two separate arrays (raid-1 for OS, raid-10 for db).

However I'd consider keeping the old server for primary AD duties and maybe running a backup AD server on the new db server. This separates primary duties, and stops the db server taking down the active directory server due to load.

akakjs
 
I would agree that RAID10 is best for DBs as a general rule, although I would hazard a guess that the scale of the DB might not justify the extra cost (in £/gb terms)

The servers look fine, although without knowing the actual load details its impossible to say. Why so much storage on the TS box though? Are your users storing files locally?

I've recently bought a few Sun servers, I was very impressed with the pricing - they can generally match Dell quotes with some negotiation. The quality of the boxes is absolutely superb - I love them. They only do rack servers though, so if you need a tower box you're out of luck :)
 
I'll deffinately split the arrays, one for OS, one for the DB with RAID 1 and 10 respectively. Doesn't push the price up much and seems worth it.

Might drop the storage down on the TS box, they are storing files locally, but they really don't store much on there. That should drop the price down on that one.

Will have a look at the Sun servers, was mainly looking at towers, because they've only got a small cabinet, but if the prices are good it might be worth a look! :)
 
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No interest in putting ESXi on both and carving them up for redundancy? Just up the RAM on the first machine and you'd be well placed...
 
BruBoy said:
No interest in putting ESXi on both and carving them up for redundancy?
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I'm not an VMWare expert; but I wouldn't think he'd see enough savings (in time or money) to justify putting a hypervisor between the OS & hardware. Don't get me wrong I love VMware; we run a cluster at our DC, and a single server for our development environment. If those two servers become 3 or 4 then ESXi would be a good choice.

akakjs
 
I dont know, those servers would happily run both servers at the same time. Redundancy for the DC and TS box would be easy, the DB might be a bit tricky.
Alternatively just get the one server (the second one) and run both on that, maybe add a second CPU if you really wanted
 
I've never really looked into virtualization to be honest and wouldn't really have a clue what I was doing. Really need to set up a server here to have a play around one day..

Have changed the specs around a bit, uped the CPU in the DC to a 2.6GHz quad, put 8GB of RAM in it, got two seperate arrays, 2 x 73GB 15k drives in RAID 1 for the OS and 4 x 73GB drives in RAID 10 for the database.

Just got to figure out if their Wyse terminals will work OK with Server 2008 before I put the quote in now..

Have done similar to the TS server as well but with 2 x 300GB SAS drives in RAID 1 for storage along with an OS array.
 
I would seriously consider virtualising them.

Set up some performance logs on the existing servers and find out how much CPU etc they are actually using.

You could potentially save a lot of money on the new kit, not to mention electric etc.

Most terminals will work fine with 2008TS, although you may need to disable the network authentication feature if the RDP client isnt v6 compatible
 
iaind said:
Most terminals will work fine with 2008TS, although you may need to disable the network authentication feature if the RDP client isnt v6 compatible
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I did think that but a guy I was speaking to was telling me older ones didn't work.. Am borrowing a spare terminal off of them for a few days anyway to test on my 2k8 server.

Will have a look into virtualization! :)
 
Street said:
I did think that but a guy I was speaking to was telling me older ones didn't work.. Am borrowing a spare terminal off of them for a few days anyway to test on my 2k8 server.

Will have a look into virtualization! :)
Click to expand...

What company do you work for out of interest?

As others have said, virtualization would make the best use of the servers listed. For our clients we use Dell PE2900s (Quad Core Xeon 3.2 GHz, 12GB RAM, 2x 400GB SAS, 2x SATA 750s) and they comfortably run a Windows 2003 DC, an Exchange Server (20-40 mailboxes), and a TS.
 
Street said:
I did think that but a guy I was speaking to was telling me older ones didn't work.. Am borrowing a spare terminal off of them for a few days anyway to test on my 2k8 server.

Will have a look into virtualization! :)
Click to expand...

Which terminals are they? Wyse are pretty on the ball with firmware updates, although you need a support agreement to get them (B*****ds)

Generally RDP5 clients (eg 2003 spec) work with RDP6 (2008), the network authentication is the only thing that can cause an issue.I know someone running several different TCs (Some HP linux, CE and XPe and some Wyse S10s) with a 2008 TS cluster - no problems
 
I did a test and the old Wyse terminals worked perfectly with NLA turned off. :)

No idea what the other guy I spoke to was going on about with older terminals not working!

Looks like they might be thinking of stepping away from the thin client set up anyway and buying 20 new PCs.. So might have all been a waste of time.

@slylittlefox.. I just work for a small company in Formby, we look after a few businesses around Merseyside. :)
 
Street said:
@slylittlefox.. I just work for a small company in Formby, we look after a few businesses around Merseyside. :)
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Is it Mr Carrol? Tis a very small world - I applied for a placement position there a couple of years ago, but had to decline in the end because of another offer. Don't think things ended to civil unfortunately. :(
 
May I ask a few "noob" questions. TS = Terminal Services?

Is that basically similar to VNC'ing into a virtualised desktop? You say you have about 20 users of this type and they're going to have to share 16GB of RAM so that works out about 800MB each :eek: hope I'm missing something:p
 
That's correct, although the RDP (remote desktop) protocol is a bit more useable than VNC :)

In terms of RAM, it doesnt really work like that. You've only got one OS overhead plus the memory is optimised for the purpose (Citrix takes this optimisation a bit further too). When you take into account most TS users are just doing office stuff, I would say 16gb is waaaaay too much RAM, but hey, RAM's cheap and future proof.

I normally see 30ish users on a TS box with 4gb RAM and 40 on a Citrix box with 4gb too. It actually provides a very nice responsive desktop environment.
 
They've got 4GB in the servers at the moment and its pretty much maxed out all the time.. Thought I might as well quote them for 16GB as like iaind said, RAM is cheap and 16GB wasn't much more than 8GB.. :) They did say they wanted pretty much the best servers they could as they'll probably have to last another 8 years or so!
 
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