General Advice

[stefarr]

Hi everyone, new to the groups 🙂

We have just purchased ESX/VSphere and are moving away from our old free esx and now i would like to upgrade our server hardware, we will be using a mix of windows servers with sql (only 2 windows guests with sql) a moodle server and some general windows 2008 servers.

i understand that more memory is always best and plan to have a minimum of 64Gig memory in each host server, might try for 128 but depends on budget.

what do i look for in terms of CPU? at the moment we have single CPU's at around 2.6 GHz each has 4 cores, things work great and normally i only have issues with amount of memory for guests (the hosts have 24Gig ram, cant upgrade any more)

Im looking at the E5645 @2.4GHz its a six core CPU, each new host will have 2 with, as stated above, between 64 and 128 Gig of RAM

any thoughts?

thanks

steve

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

without knowing anything about the old hardware specs it's hard give you an advice. However, with the requirements you mentioned, I'm pretty sure you will be happy with the new hosts. What type of storage do you use? Shared or local? In case of local, ensure the RAID controller has battery-backed write cache (BBU/BBWC/FBWC)!

André

[stefarr]

Hi and many thanks, the new hosts will be using local and shared, i was planning on using LSI mega raid card's (was using 3ware cards) for the local storage with the BBU, i would like eventually to use the Vmware VSA as im looking at getting 3 new hosts eventually.

thanks again

[jfrappier]

Hi Steve,

I tend to see disk as the more limiting factor in new installations as most modern servers have the CPU and memory capacity for typical workloads, but not all work loads are typical.  Do you have any historical performance data from your SQL servers and moodle server?

I just scoped a small environment for a customer and the sweet spot for the CPU for their environment was the Xeon E5-2620 but we were expecting some decent growth over the next 2-3 years.

[jdptechnc]

If you're planning for three hosts, plan your capacity as though you are only going to run your VM's on two hosts to account for loss of a server.  Personally I would opt for 2 pCPUs per server, if you have the budget for it.  How many "general Windows" servers are you going to be running?

[stefarr]

jdptechnc: yeah i have decided to go for 2 physical CPU's per host and at least 64 Gig RAM with LSI raid card, in total im thinking of around 12-16 windows servers at the moment, it might rise over time, i need to try and consolidate some servers, i have a couple of servers that do very little every day, I'd thought I'd combine what the do on to one guest, this way I'd be able to retire 2 guest servers.

jfrappier: no dont have much historicial data to look at, the first host were just a test that grew in to what they are now, looking at the host's though i can see memory is the bigest resource used..

guess in the new setup i'd be doubling the CPU's and memory increasing the raid controller and disk speeds (depending on cost)

any ideas for a cheap remote storage solution? I was looking at open e-dss

http://www.open-e.com/

any realworld use and thoughts on this?