Specs for servers..

Street

Street

Street

Soldato
Joined
17 Jan 2005
Posts
8,693
Location
Liverpool
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
 
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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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.
 
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
Click to expand...

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! :)
 
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. :)
 
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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