Honestly, on the RAM front don't think "what is enough?" and just put in whatever you can afford to put in.
Trust me on this, when you have vmware/hyper-v you will find yourself standing up VM's all the time for testing/application isolation and all sorts of things that you just couldn't do with a physical box* I would still spend a little time benchmarking your current IOPS. My gut reaction is that something like a Dell R510 stuffed full of SAS drives and a good RAID controller, running in RAID10 would give you a hell of a lot of grunt for not a lot of money. On the SAN/redundancy point, if you've looked at it and don't need it then fair enough, I won't try and convince you otherwise, but equally I wouldn't want you to rule it out on the assumption that SAN = tens of thousands of $$$. Equally look at buying the cheapest box on the vmware/hyper-v HCL that you can get away with - that's the biggest benefit of virtualisation, that you can run the VM's on pretty much anything. It might be slow, but slow is > unavailable :) * licenses permitting -----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 02 December 2011 20:24 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Virtualization - Sizing, hard disk config 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 -- MIRA Ltd Watling Street, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, CV10 0TU, England Registered in England and Wales No. 402570 VAT Registration GB 100 1464 84 The contents of this e-mail are confidential and are solely for the use of the intended recipient. If you receive this e-mail in error, please delete it and notify us either by e-mail, telephone or fax. You should not copy, forward or otherwise disclose the content of the e-mail as this is prohibited. ~ 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
