RE: [ActiveDir] DC Configuration

[Myrick, Todd \(NIH/CC/DCRI\) [E]]

Some of my opinions based on my own research.   I prefer hot swappable hardware RAID 1 for all boot / system partitions no matter what the role of the server is.  To me this gives the fastest disaster recovery option for situations you are unsure about with regards to OS updates and single drive failures.  On a side note we used to use three mirrors for our domain controller setups. 1 for system/boot/syslog, 1 for transaction logs, and 1 for data.  We mirrored this after our exchange setup, except in Exchange we used RAID 5 arrays to store the data. With regards to number of spindles and performance, I discussed this with someone on the list before (Guido) and people at HP and we came to the conclusion that with the latest 15K drives you won’t see any tangible performance improvements going with multiple mirrors unless you DC’s service more than 5000 people in that location where the DC resides. Judging from the original posters SMTP information, it looks like his organization has less than 5000 people in it, so I recommend his first option.   Follow-up thoughts looking for group input.   With regards to when is it best to use Software RAID, I have debated this with several people and I seem to favor this approach in Virtual Server Environments and using it on the System/Boot Partition for DR purposes.  Another possible use for the software based mirroring might be to create live copy of server for duplication purposes (personally I think there are much better approaches out there.)  Any thoughts on this?   What Disk type do you all recommend?  I currently still stick to the Basic Disk for the most part. (Unless I want to use software based fault-tolerance).   Thanks,   Todd       From: Al Mulnick [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, June 22, 2006 11:17 PM To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] DC Configuration   Interesting how much traffic this subject has garnered.    But I have to ask, why? I mean, we haven't even heard the performance concepts and you're ready to put this on extra hardware no questions. What if he only had about 500 users? Would that still hold? What if it were a largely distributed environment and they had a network such that they needed many smaller vs. fewer larger DC's? Maybe a branch office environment?   I hate software raid (joe's sure to put that definition in a wiki somewhere) because of the false sense of hope it gives the implementer.  But I do understand the idea of the least amount of hardware for the task at hand and not a penny more hardware than is needed.  Not that I'm even coming close to endorsing software level RAID - far from it.    So why not a RAID 1 partition that holds all the OS, binaries, log files, file and print facilities etc?   It's a distributed app and could very easily work to the specs needed in a largely distributed architecture. Were RODC available, it might be chosen for some of the ones I have in mind.    I'm sure you feel I'm baiting you and picking on you Gil but I am curious what some of the thinking in the crowd is  <G>     On 6/22/06, Gil Kirkpatrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: OS, DIT, logs on separate spindles. Enough memory to store the DIT + overhead. -gil -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Al Lilianstrom Sent: Thursday, June 22, 2006 1:24 PM To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org Subject: [ActiveDir] DC Configuration We have some budget money to replace domain controllers this year. Not all of them but probably half of them. We've pretty much decided on 64 bit Dell PowerEdge servers. Most of the discussion is about disk configuration. Two schools of thought exist here. 1) 2x73GB 15K drives in RAID1. Carve up the volume at the OS level with 20GB or so for the OS and the remainder for NTDS, Sysvol, and system state backups 2) Two sets of 2x73 10K drives in RAID1. The first set is for the OS, the second is for NTDS, Sysvol, and system state backups. I've always liked physically separating the OS from the application data. Others here like carving up the volume at the OS. Any thoughts, opinions, suggestions?        tia, al -- Al Lilianstrom CD/CSS/CSI [EMAIL PROTECTED] List info   : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ    : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.activedir.org/ml/threads.aspx List info   : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ    : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.activedir.org/ml/threads.aspx