Hello everyone, We have a fairly significant Citrix environment, totalling about 110 servers. We use Dell PowerEdge Blade servers ranging from 1855s, 1955s, and M600s. We deliver published applications via separate application silos. A couple of our most heavily used silos (delivering Office and other supporting applications) experience pretty heavy disk utilization. We're in the process of diagnosing those servers to determine what processes are hammering the disks, calculating total IOPS, disk latency, etc. All of our servers have two local drives that are mirrored. We're going to be testing new configurations involving no raid configuration, with the second drive allocated to hosting the page file, spooler directory etc, in an effort to balance IO. Since we have enough servers in each application silo, and an automated build process, we're going on the assumption that a disk failure causing a server crash could be mitigated fairly quickly and wouldn't impact the environment.
At the same time, we're looking at alternative hardware technologies that we could possibly leverage to provide better performance. We only recently identified that our 1855s and 1955s don't have any caching capabilities on the controllers. This prevents us from adopting one of the best practices of balancing read/write caching, 25%/75% respectively. Our M600s do have 128MB cache, but it is not battery backed. While we could deal with the risk of losing data should a server lose power, we don't have the capability of balancing read/write caching as we see fit. Apparently, Dell will be providing the PERC controllers in their M610 (and other models) within the next few months. They would include 256MB battery backed cache with the ability to balance caching. We've also been looking at the possibility of configuring new Blades (M610s) with solid state drives, and thus the reason for my e-mail. Has anyone out there implemented any type of Blade servers with solid state drives? I'm just looking for real world experience to determine if the advertised performance really translates to an improved end user experience. Are there any realiability issues you've come across? Etc? - Sean ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
