RE: Need hardware recommendation (long)
- From: Carl Ebbinghaus <cje@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 14:29:49 -0400
Tony, thanks for your reply. Replies inline...
> Hello Carl,
>
> Let me take a stab at suggesting a starting point. From there, you can go in
> any direction you choose...
>
> The advantage and concept of SBS is to run a big server centralizing your
> Server applications and functionality. The benefits of this will be simpler
> maintenance, centralized and simpler setups and should result in reduced
> costs.
>
> The flip side of centralizing your network functionality is that if this one
> machine breaks your entire network will be down... so provision your machine
> accordingly. Do not focus only on perfromance and functionality, be sure to
> built plenty of reliability into your machine as well.
>
> To that end, your hard drive system is probably the most critical subsystem
> which can be a performance bottleneck as well as a point of failure. If you
> intend for your machine to be around for more than 3 years, <count> on at
> least one disk failure incident and ask yourself how quickly do you want to
> recover and how much sweat do you want to endure? You have many choices here,
> and you want to implement at least 2 or 3...
Given our owners I'm pretty sure it will be around for more than 3
years. In 18 years we've only had three main PC servers. I've asked our
owners over and over how quickly they want to be back up in the case of
a catastrophic failure. In 18 years I've never gotten a response.
>
> - Disk Fault Tolerance. Disk Mirroring can work for small systems. Maybe
> you'll want to plan for larger disk space. RAID5 or RAID10 will be much more
> cost-effective than mirroring. Maybe you'll want to improve speed. RAID 5 and
> RAID10 are faster than mirroring. Never omit some sort of RAID or just RAID 0
> unless you don't care about preserving data.
> - Hot Swap disk support. Usually means SCSI disks. This means you don't have
> to bring the server down and reboot every time you might need to
> install/replace a new drive. Along the same idea, make sure your disk arrays
> can be re-built as a background process without affecting network performance
> greatly.
> - Backups. Today, there are many choices. NTBackup is included in SBS, and
> it does a good job, but recovery can take hours or days and is difficult to
> verify good. Imaging is fast. Virtualization enables you to re-deploy within
> seconds on another machine, at least temporarily if not permanently.
We run mirrors now and I have spare drives in stock. I'm still debating
hot-swaps and hot-spares. We don't run a second or third shift and I can
replace a drive and re-mirror overnight if we have a problem. We've also
had a number of problems using hot-swapping on the 1.6T RAID array our
art department uses so I'm a bit gun-shy about hot-swapping.
We run daily tape backups and copy our entire accounting system to my
computer where I back it up, take them home, and install on a system I
have at home so I have a running copy of our accounting system offsite.
We also image the servers using Portlock's Storage Manager to a Snap
Server on our network.
> - Volume Shadow Copy. You can create snapshots of selected parts of your
> Server to another Win2K3 Server. This can also be a cool way of storing
> snapshots of any XP workstations... but, remember what kind of disk space
> this will require.
Interesting. I don't remember seeing much about VSC in the webpages I've
viewed nor the docs I've downloaded from Microsoft. I'll need to learn
more about this before I finalize our hardware purchase.
>
> You'll want to re-think your use of DHCP and DNS... or at least your current
> lack of use. SBS will require you to implement both services (on SBS, not
> other devices like your router) to provide best performance. By centralizing
> these network services, you can control from <one place> how every machine in
> your network finds any other machine or resource in your network. Today,
> you're touching every machine. With SBS, that becomes largely a thing of the
> past, instead of running around to make 18 different settings, you make only
> one setting that will do the same thing.
Lack of use?
I plan to use SBS for DNS. Moving DHCP to SBS is not an issue - we can
easily disable DHCP on the router. As I said we use static IP on the
workstations setting the last number to their phone extension. It makes
it easy to VNC into their machines for support. The only machines that
will be making DHCP calls will be visiting clients which is rare.
We've never run peer-to-peer and we don't share resources between
workstations.
With VNC we never travel around the office to do anything anymore
<grin>.
>
> So, considering the cost of hardware today (it's very cheap compared to
> years past) I strongly recommend you provision your Server to be as big you
> you can afford while still staying in the economic "sweet spot" getting value
> for money spent.
Our last server was over $7,000 dollars. The sweet spot is what I'm
trying to find.
>
> That usually means
> - Dual procs although a single proc can be fine if it's expandable to dual.
> - I strongly recommend at least 512kb L2 processor cache. When considering
> costs, doubling L2 cache usually has a bigger effect than doubling the
> processor speed (IMO).
> - RAM can be almost anything. SBS runs very well on only 1GB of RAM, but
> it's hard to not recommend more when I can typically buy high quality RAM at
> about $160/stick for most machines (server quality).
I was thinking dual right off the bat but starting with a single
processor in a dual capable mobo is a good idea. I was leaning towards
the 2M cache and 2G of RAM if I put our accounting system on the server.
If I setup a separate server for the accounting system do you think
something like a P4, 3.0GHz, 1M cache, 1M Ram would be sufficient for
the SBS server?
>
> I also personally do not recommend glorified workstations as servers, I
> value high quality server instead of el cheapo components but do whatever
> your budget allows.
Agree.
>
> I'd also suggest that if this is your first SBS install that you install a
> couple times in a test environment before you roll it out to your Production
> network. And, install a dual NIC configuration although SBS supports a single
> NIC configuration as well, it's worth the extra work to have better security.
I always test first.
I've never had a security issue with our current configuration, what's
better about SBS's security? From what I've read SBS does NAT which is
what my router is doing now.
Would the built-in NIC's on the motherboard be sufficient with SBS or
should we add cards?
> If you start today, you may feel ready to roll out in no less than a month,
> maybe several. Consider active assistance from an SBS expert to get you up
> and running initially.
>
> As for partitioning, I believe I posted my recommendation in this group
> several months ago, so it should be searchable.
I'll look for it.
>
> Other suggestions:
> - Do not install WinFax on SBS. SBS has its own FAX solution, or continue to
> run WinFax on its own box.
> - Some centralized applications will run fine on SBS, but others like Winfax
> don't play well with other applications and so should be on their own boxes.
> Ask about specific apps if you can't find a posting someone has already made
> about that app.
WinFax is going to stay on it's own box. It's used by our accounting
system which won't work with SBS's fax software. The accounting system
has special client licenses built into it so we never purchased client
licenses for the workstations. That's one of the reasons I want SBS, I
would rather buy SBS then spend money on 20 or 30 WinFax client licenses
so our users can fax from Office.
>
> Good Luck,
Thanks, luck seems to be something that is usually in short supply when
you need it.
> Tony
>
>
>
>
--
Carl Ebbinghaus
.
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