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What's your server RAID config?

I've seen the docs and watched a video on building a server for NPM, but I'm curious what builds people are using. Here's what I was thinking:

2 disk, RAID1 for OS+pagefile

2 disk, RAID1 for tempdb

2 disk, RAID1 for transaction logs

4 disk RAID 10 for database

We are an NPM 2000 and APM 1000 customer.

The question I have is regarding disk utilization:

1. how much space do I need for the tempdb volume, the tlogs volume, the db volume, etc?

2. are the tempdb and tlog volumes really benefiting from their own spindles? I realize it's best practice, but if the average disk sec/transfer and disk queue lengths are really low, they may not need their own spindles. if I could put them both on a RAID 1 set that'd be great. same with the db. if a RAID 1 set can handle that, even better.

3. how much ram are you using? 8GB? 64? 4?

Thanks!

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byrona

How robust you need to build your systems depends on your Orion implementation's size and configuration. With the license levels you have you shouldn't need too get to crazy with the environment unless you plan to really scale it out later.

We are running Orion SLX and Orion APM ALX and we have one Additional Polling Engine. We have our Primary Orion system on it's own VM with 2 Processor Cores and 4Gb of memory, the 2nd Polling Engine is configured the same way. The data for the polling engines is located on a NetApp Fiber Channel vFiler. Our SQL system is a dedicated server with a 2 disk RAID1 Array for the OS and a 4 disk RAID10 Array for SQL and has 32Gb of memory.

Hope this helps.

MrSampsonite

Hi Byron,

It's hard to tell as we're still in the trial. We're approaching 1 GB after about 30 days. We don't have the resources for your setup, but it looks great.

byrona

Based on your license levels, you shouldn't need an environment as big as ours. If at all possible try and keep your polling engine on a different physical system from your SQL database and also shoot for RAID10 for your SQL DB and as much memory as you can muster for it. If you do those two things you should be good.

Also, if you have a virtual environment you can always run the polling engines as VM's, that works out very well for us.

MrSampsonite

I just opened a thread on why to separate the two environments. maybe we can take this there for organization purposes?

So you're saying a RAID 10 set can handle the IO of the tempdb, tlogs, and db?

mcbridea

Here is a good thread on RAID and Orion/SQL with NTA.

Donald_Francis

After years of going back and forth on the subject I have come to the point to where I will make 1 large RAID 10 array and just use different partitions for OS and DATA or whatever else and let everything including the page file make use of the spindles and the speed.