Physical vs. Virtual = IO, IO, IO. Over-subscription of hardware is very common in virtualization. If “they” can guarantee high IO levels (storage and network primarily) and dedicated RAM, then it’s somewhat moot and virtual will work fine and has the advantage of being hardware independent. Using virtual though is sometimes more expensive for ConfigMgr because many orgs only have high-speed disks available for their VMs. This is great for many things, but the large amounts of space ConfigMgr uses for the content library do not need to be on high-speed disks and thus it’s a waste of money to use high-speed disks for this.
J From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Gailfus, Nick Sent: Wednesday, October 7, 2015 2:24 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [mssms] New SCCM 2012 R2 Primary Site Hardware Specs I have been tasked with migrating our two stand alone primary SCCM 2012 sites into one site to manage the whole company. Right now our two IT teams in different parts of the country built and operate our own SCCM. I have pushed to merge into one primary for the whole company. What I am inquiring on is the hardware. While looking at this page here https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh846235.aspx I have considered a physical server, much like what we are currently running with each addtional RAM. At our last count for our volume licensing we have about 7500 clients and servers. I would like to build this site to handle at least 10,000 for growth. The specs I proposed was * 8 cores * 32 GB of RAM * At least 500 GB for database on a RAID 10 array * Addition RAID array for content. I planned on having SQL run on the server as well. My boss chimed back asking why am I considering physical over virtual. We would have about 80 distribution points as well under this primary. I did propose that the software update point run on a separate server and that server can be a VM. So my questions are. * Are these specs enough or too much? * Would virtualizing work with 10,000 clients? * Are there any good methods of calculating hardware needs? Nick
