Re: Hardware specs question

All,
Followed this thread with great interest. Have used sbs since V4.0, now we
are ready to migrate from sbs2000 to sbs2003 and want to avoid the out of
disk space problem that has happened on each version over time. Current
sbs2000 OS partition is 8GB and ran out of space in year 4. New hardware is
eight 32 GB drives. Based on what I'm reading here, looks like i should set
up two for the RAID1 OS, the other six as RAID 5 for data. But what about
the exchange DB? Should it be on a separate partition?
Thanks for helping.
Richard


"SuperGumby [SBS MVP]" <not@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%23E7yuMdKGHA.3100@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Want to use all four processors? SBS will only use two, as others have
confirmed.

MAPS (MS Action Pack Subscription) has also been mentioned elsewhere. It
contains two (three, but it sounds like you already have one) interesting
items, Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition (for 4 way SMP), Virtual
Server
2005, and a copy of SBS 2003 Premium.

There is a downside, but I don't think it will impact you greatly. Running
SBS in a Virtual Server 'virtual machine' it will only utilise a single
processor. You could allow it to use 100% of this processor and the other
three can run your host OS, which could possibly be used as an Application
Mode Terminal Server. I believe however that support of SMP in the virtual
machine is planned for in future.

On the issue of HDD's. Having all those drives allows you to have a bit of
fun, and also build in some intelligent optimisation. A Quad Xeon 700 was
probably a server of some sort, though I do know an architect who used a
QX500 as a CAD workstation, so those drives have probably been running
24*7
for some reasonable amount of time, let's hope they're burnt in rather
than
burnt out but... I'd lay aside two HDD's as hotspares, should an array
member fail a hotspare will automatically replace it.

A pair of HDD's in RAID 1 for the OS gives you good performance and full
redundancy. When applying major change to the system (say, service pack)
you
can remove a drive before the change and use it as a fallback point should
things go pear shaped. If the change is successful you re-incorporate the
drive into your RAID sets (by this time one of your hotspares has replaced
this drive's function, so it becomes a hotspare).

2 for the RAID1 OS, 2 as hotspares, leaves us 8 drives.

4 in RAID 10 to house our Virtual Server HDD images sounds good,
throughput
and redundancy.
4 in RAID 5 for normal DATA.

I hope the RAID controller has multiple channels. If so I'd probably put
the
OS, the RAID 5, and a hotspare onto one channel, the RAID 10 and a
hotspare
onto the other.

"Kev Kindred" <deviate@ *remove this to email me* ntlworld.com> wrote in
message news:eVZDqTGKGHA.3332@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi
Im "The guy who knows about computers" at work and therefore have be
made
the SBS Standard network admin - lucky me. The system is ticking along
fine - mostly - with issues resolved normaly through trawling here and
the
nice people at google. To expand my knowledge Ive just picked up a quad
Xeon 700 (2mb cache), 12 18.2 sccsi's (now raid 5) and 2gb of ram and am
in the proccess of setting it up at home as a test box so I have
something
to play with - instead of breaking the works one before software patches
and upgrades etc - I will have the same software and roughly the same
set
ups
My question(s) are although the CPU's are only 700's and it seems to be
only useing 2 (although it knows there are 4 cpu's installed under
system
properties) will SBS run okay with such small cpu's - there will be 2
maybe 3 of us using it at home for email and net access (as server - not
as a workstation - its gonna sit under the stairs - its a bit noisy with
all them fans) - does it actually use all 4 CPUs or not ??
as I have a fair amount of space should I have configured the aray as
raid
1+0 ?? or is raid 5 okay (I havent read up on raid 5 tbh and dont
understand why its so great)

thanks for looking

Kev K





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