On Friday 18 May 2007, David Guest wrote: > I am trying to spec up a Xen box. It will run two debian guests and > three Windows guests. MSSQL will be the database server on Windows and > MySQL on linux. The MSSQL will be the machine working the hardest, > although I will need at least a gig of RAM for one of the linux vboxen. > > Horst, what would you recommend in terms of CPUs (2 or 4?), > hyperthreading (turned off?), RAM (8 gig?), 32 or 64 bit for this > configuration. Anything else I should consider?
I don't think I am qualified to answer that, since I have too little MS product experience. MSSQL will be your biggest ressource hog I guess, so I would run it natively. A stripped down w2k or XP with no other software installed and permissions locked down can be made run reliably, is just a lot more work than I ever could be bothered with. Hyperthreading is a potentially huge advantage for virtualization (as opposed to running a single OS) if your virtualization software can take advantage of it, so I would switch it on. However, if your OS does not allow to manually distribute processes across real or virtual processors, performance might go down a bit if the number of virtualizations exceeds the number of processors x hyperthreaded (virtual) processors. You are planning to run 5 guest OS plus the host = 6, so I'd try by trial and error works out better for you if you don't find it cheaper simply spend on a hardware overkill instead of "wasting your time" engineering an efficient solution You have a fairly large practice with probably large databases with many index files and many concurrent user, so more RAM is going to be an advantage - and more than 4GB RAM already excludes 32 bit OS. Horst _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
