Re: SBS 2003 Premium R2 Hardware Upgrade - Advice sought!

I'm surprised the CPU is running that high, even though those procs are quite a bit behind the curve. One thing to look at is which processes are really using the CPU, and see if there's an easy way to offload some of those functions to a second server. (For example, if it's SQL that's eating processor cycles, it's fairly straightforward to move it to a second machine. If it's Exchange, primarily, that's less easy.)

If I were buying a machine today, I would look at something that had dual 51xx Xeon processors, and good disk I/O. Something like an HP ML350 G5 would be a good fit. Or something with dual 2000 series Opteron processors, though I happen to think that Intel has a slight edge right now. In either case, however, you'd have a machine that was well suited to run the next version of SBS which will only run on 64bit hardware.

--
Charlie.
http://msmvps.com/blogs/xperts64

"John F Kappler" <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:vsf7q25su980pkdrmfjl9tunq61fvedkd2@xxxxxxxxxx
We are now running SBS 2003 Premium Release 2 with SQL 2005.

The system it runs on seems to be struggling in the CPU area and I'd
appreciate some advice on a way forward. For information, the current
config is:

Dual Pentium III 966 Mhz Processors
2.0 Gb RAM
2 (Mirrored) 80 Gb HDD - 50% Used

We cannot add more memory to this motherboard and processor usage
during the day seem to be 70-100%.

We have two SQL Database applications, one of which is new, plus the
usual Exchange e-mail, and a push e-mail application.

I presume we have two basic options:

1) Get a second server and offload some of the applications on to it,
or,
2) Upgrade to a bigger, faster server.

The advantage of 1) would seem to be more fallback capability, but the
disadvantage would be having to SBS operating systems, licenses, etc.

Any thoughts?

I'd be particularly interested in any recommendations for minimum
config for option 2).

TIA

JohnK

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