On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 2:34 PM, Paul Hutchings <[email protected]> wrote: > Spend some time logging your IOPS so you know what you need to support.
Since we're moving to Win 2008R2 and Exchange 2010 (I forgot to mention that), and virtualization on top of that, I haven't been putting a lot of thought towards benchmarking our current systems. I was assuming what we have now would not translate to what we're going to get. > Don't skimp on RAM - that is where you will usually start to see a bottleneck > long before you do CPU > and disk (assuming you know what IOPS you need and spec accordingly). Not planning on skimping on it. The question I have is -- *what is enough*. 16 GB? 24? 32? > Ideally, buy two boxes, with one box all your eggs are in one basket ... I am aware of this. As you say, it's what we have now. It's relatively cheap for us to get a service contract to cover hardware failures to the 2HR mark. Two boxes doubles the cost. Or they're not powerful enough to handle the load, in which case, you're not really getting redundancy. > Don't rule out SAN storage. People think SAN and think expensive hardware - > there are a > number of low cost (relative) software SANs that let you take DAS storage and > pool it and > cluster it. Cheapest decent stuff I have found is still a drastic price increase over DAS, even with just a single server. I am aware of the benefits of SANs. For this organization, at this time, they don't justify the cost. > Backup - don't overlook it. Haven't. Planned for. :) But thanks for checking. :) -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
