Understood, I tend to use rules of thumb a lot. Use what ever metrics and scientific methods work best for you to make informed decisions.
My suggestion is to mitigate a simple hardware failure of a drive, and share what I consider acceptable performance based on published standards and the ever changing hardware environment. In the MS NT4 days it was considered rule of thumb to add additional domain controllers for ever 5000 (maybe it was 2.5K) users served. I interpreted Al's request more just a gut check, he didn't ask for empirical evidence. Todd -----Original Message----- From: Brett Shirley [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, June 23, 2006 8:41 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] DC Configuration I think to go from 5000 users to a load metric (across organizations) is ridiculous ... one orgs 5000 users do not generate the same load as anothers 5000 users. Be careful about making comparisons like that. Just my 2c. Cheers, -BrettSh On Fri, 23 Jun 2006, Al Lilianstrom wrote: > Myrick, Todd (NIH/CC/DCRI) [E] wrote: > > Some of my opinions based on my own research. > > > > > > > > 1. 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. > > 2. 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. > > I had a feeling that 15K drives wouldn't buy me much. After some reading > last night I'm even more convinced. For our size I think I'll be going > with 2 mirror sets and as much memory as we can afford. > > > 3. 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. > > > > While my 'organization' has less that 5000 employees we can have from > 1-4000 visitors here at any time. With the Accelerator running (as it is > now) we'll be crowded for the next 1.5 years. > > > > > 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). > > > > We use basic for most for the most part. The only time I use dynamic is > when I have to create a large (>5TB) volume on some of the SATA boxes > that we have that host some large-ish SQL databases. > > 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 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
