Monitoring Performance

Hi

We are shortly to open a branch office, initally to hold 2 staff and to
expand to a max of 4-6.

Our main site has 20 users and we have this spec:

SBS 2k3 Premium
Dell Power Edge 2600
2 x 3.06 Xeons
2 GB Ram
PERC 4/DC RAID Controller
2 x 36 GB 15k SCSI RAID 1 System Disks
4 x 36 GB 15k SCSI RAID 5 Data Disks

We have a 2.5 GB Exchange Server that will be replicated to the remote site.

We are running a number of SQL Server databases, most have little use but
one is almost 1 GB and is used constantly. It it not used for particularly
'heavy' queries but is used by all staff for most activities as it is a
client/document/supplier/accounting system. The SQL database is to be
trasactionally replicated to the branch office server. We generate many
Word documents a day (150-250) and information throughout the documents is
populated by information from the database.

We also have about 22 GB of data, manly in the form of Word documents,
PDF's, TIffs, User Roaming Profiles etc which will be Replicated using DFS
FRS to the remote server (I know roaming profiles replication is not
reccomended but necessary in our case, we will impliment policy to stop
certain problems occuring).

ISA 2004 on both sites will provide firewalling and VPN between sites.

Sorry a long intro but...... I want to purchase an adequate server for the
remote site, I do not want our staff to be waiting for the server to respond
(as our staff bill is over half our company's expediture) so we want
something fast, but obviously want to not go overboard and not to spend
money in the wrong places only to find we needed something different.

I know there is never a straight forward answer to what hardware should we
buy... How can we easily monitor our main office server to see how the
hardware is used and we can therefore guestimate what hardware is necessary.

Also I assume that somethings such as RAM will need to be the same on both
sites as the base operating system, SQL and Exchange will occupy similar
quantities of RAM.

Any advice would be much apprecated.

Thanks
B


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Relevant Pages

  • Re: SBS2003 Prem and branch office W2003 server: replication errors
    ... The usual reason for replication errors in the scenario you detailed is DNS ... have to dcpromo demote the branch office server and start again. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • Re: KCC ignores bridgehead
    ... The Server 2003 hostin this site is the PDC ... Each spoke (branch office) is a site. ... redirect normal login traffic off of the PDC emulator. ... single point of failure for replication to-from the main site. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.active_directory)
  • Transactional or Merge ?
    ... I am planning to configure replication to ... configured each branch office server as publisher and Corporate server ...
    (microsoft.public.sqlserver.replication)
  • Re: File Replication
    ... I have folders at our main office that I'm ... going to need to replicate to the branch office each night. ... Once I do the initial replication there shouldn't be more than 100-150MB each ... although I admit not having looked at Server 2003 R2 which ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.networking)
  • Re: Satellite Branch Office Woes
    ... point of a "satellite branch office" is to provide Directory and all other ... services from the central site, "eliminating the need for costly server ... DNS and DHCP. ... If no server at the site, can you get a T1 to the site instead of a DSL? ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.active_directory)