Re: Experiences with x64 and quadcore scalability.
- From: "Reinder Gerritsen" <VDSG@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2006 10:17:46 +0100
Virtualizing does provide options as license costs are not that large.
Problem here is that we's rather not go virtual due to the numbers. With 3
virtualized, one nicely beefed up Virtual server would manage quite
allright. However this brings in a point of failure where one
restarting/crashing piece of hardware would bring down the entire terminal
environment. That's something I can't sell to our Management, no matter what
I say about predicted stability of that specific server. If our talking
about 20 terminal servers distributed over 5 virutal server host machines
it's a little different, but to truely manage something like that I think
VMWare ESX is more like the product you want, and that will truely increase
the bill...
But thanks for the thoughts and your comments on 32 bit applications on
64bit servers.
"guyyardeni" <guyyardeni@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:umX3BoqKHHA.1424@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Reinder,
One of the challenges I've encountered is using 64bit for a terminal
server is that since most required applications are 32 bit, they don't all
behave well in a 64-bit environment (in terms of stability,
interoperability and performance) and even when they do, they share a
single 32bit emulator session resulting in limited gains in performance. I
would suggest testing your applications to verify their behavior on the
platform.
Another option to consider that works well is to deploy a 64bit OS on the
server and then use VMWare Server or Microsoft Virtual Server to deploy
guest virtual machines running 32bit OS for your terminal servers. The VM
software is free and it allows you to run the guest OSes for free as well
(up to 4 I believe). This would allow a configuration of a machine with
16GB of physical RAM to run 4 32-bit terminal servers with 4GB of RAM each
which would support quite a load on a single physical box without
incurring additional software cost. In addition, in this scenario, the VM
software would manage allocating the processors which should allow for
flexibility in choosing the most cost effective CPU configuration.
--
Guy Yardeni
Remove 9s to email me
"Reinder Gerritsen" <VDSG@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:uF3yIGpKHHA.3668@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
We're preparing to migrate our terminal server environment to new
hardware and software installations. We're currently running on 2 single
P3 boxes and 2 dual Xeon2.8HT boxes for about 100 users in all. We're
currently thinking about 3 replacement servers based on the CoreDuo or
QuadCore. This is a lot more power, I know, but we've had serious
performance issues lately, and after the migration, we want to have
enough overhead to keep running after one server fails, and enough
processing power to keep running during intense jobs. Also we intend to
move most of the company to the terminal environment (estimated up to 250
concurrent users).We're thinking about x64, but I'm not sure 64bit is
ready yet for this kind of implementation due to things like print
drivers, older custom business applications etc.
Main questions for me right now are:
- How does Terminal server scale up against multi core CPU's. In the past
I've been told about a rule that it was better to take 2 dual CPU
machines then just one quad CPU. this because the costs are a lot higher,
and the performance increase isn't all that due to I/O Disk performance
bottlenecks. With multicore this changes a bit as the server remains the
same, and so the difference in costs is acceptable. So I could buy a box
equipped with either 2 E5310 (1.6 GHz) quadcores, or one with 2 dualcore
3GHz cpu's... but will I realy benefit from the increased number of cores
in this situation...?
- What are the true problems in migrating from 32bits to Windows x64. I
can imagine that antivirus is an issue - having read about issues with
Symantec Anti Virus - but I'm a little hesitant knowing there are several
homebuild and cutom applications that just might get in the way. Would it
realy be usefull moving to x64, knowing that our office suite still is
Office XP, and within the next 6 months is not likely to change to newer
versions like office 2007? Also printerdrivers might be an issue as we
have quite a lot of different printer models. Advantage then would be the
build-in sessiondirectory which isn't available in 32-standard, not to
mention x64 is where computing is going in the future...
Hopefully you can share some experience and ideas with me on this.
Regards,
Reinder
.
- References:
- Experiences with x64 and quadcore scalability.
- From: Reinder Gerritsen
- Re: Experiences with x64 and quadcore scalability.
- From: guyyardeni
- Experiences with x64 and quadcore scalability.
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