This discussion has been locked. The information referenced herein may be inaccurate due to age, software updates, or external references.

You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a similar question you can start a new discussion in this forum.

New App server & new database server

AMidnightSoul over 13 years ago

Our enterprise group has informed us that it’s time for new servers for Orion & for the database. They are asking for our recommendations.

We use NPM, Netflow, NCM & are looking at purchasing the Engineers Toolset in the near future.

We will use one server for the Orion suite of apps and one server for the database.

We have 2141 elements, which will gradually increase. We pull netflow data from 185 devices, with around 900 interfaces that we monitor netflow traffic on, so we have quite a bit of netflow data. We keep uncompressed Netflow data for 60 minutes & compressed data for 60 days.

For the database server we will request the team set the server up as follows:

C: - 15 k drives, RAID1 for OS (our dba recommended RAID1 instead of RAID0, in case we have a failure, so we don’t go offline)

E: - 15 k drives, RAID1 SQL Server & SQL temp database & logs

F: - 15 k drives, RAID10 for the NPM/NTA database

How should we divide the space among the spindles? I’m thinking at least 150 GB for the database partition. We’re going to ask for minimum of 1TB of space for the DB server. Database is currently 6100MB.

Does it matter for the application server, regarding the spindles?

They are purchasing HP Prolients with AMD Opteron 6174, which has 12 core 2.2 GHz CPU’s, which is lower than the recommended 3.0 GHz, but since it has 12 cores, they think we should be okay. Is that a fair assessment?

Also, I noticed that the minimum RAM is 3 GB, but it’s recommended to get as much RAM as you can get for the database server. If it’s running in 32-bit mode, can it benefit from more than 4GB?

They’ve asked why we can’t put the database on the same box as the server, but we’re going to request that they keep them as separate servers for performance reasons. We used to have them on the same server and took a big performance hit.

They will run Windows Server 2008 R2 and the database server will have SQL Server 2008 standard.

0 netlogix over 13 years ago

I would say raid 5 on F... Logs on E take away the reasoning for Raid 10 for the DB, plus if you had 4 disks in raid 10, then you would only have read speed of 2, but with raid 5, it would go up to 3. (6 disks would be 3 -> 5, etc).
Server 2008 R2 is 64bit, make sure to install 64bit SQL and a good amount of RAM (> 4GB).
With the App/Polling/Web server, I would say Server 2008 R2 w/ > 4GB.
The 2.2 ghz should be OK, I don't think CPU requirements should be said in ghz any more, because the CPUs just aren't being speeding up in that way anymore. You might still be pushing the server with all the netflow, but I'm not all that sure; with a 6gb DB, it shouldn't be all that much data.
How many disks do you have to work with?
I have virtual 4 vCPUs Server 2008 R2 w/8 gb RAM for each of mine. I have NCM, 1812 NPM elements and 909 APM elements. Database is about 6gb. No Netflow. Yes, virtual on both, it runs great! My vSphere SAN has 56 HDD array that writes everything to raid 10 and over night converts it to RAID 5, so write is fast and I still have the space and speed benefit of RAID 5. (Compellent SAN).
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Cancel
0 AMidnightSoul over 13 years ago in reply to netlogix

Thanks for the response. We were looking at 8 total disks, so the RAID5 might be the way to go. I hadn't realized the read speed issue would decrease with a RAID10 with only 4 disks.
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Cancel
0 netlogix over 13 years ago in reply to AMidnightSoul

With only 4 disks it's not that much. It would feel like 2 instead of 3... if raid 10 across 10 disks it would be 5 vs 9; much bigger difference. So, yeah with 4 disks, not too much to it. But I am a bit of a perfectionist so if I see 3 > 2, then do it that way.
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Cancel
0 AMidnightSoul over 13 years ago in reply to netlogix

Thanks for the response! I'm pulling the specs together this week to turn in next week.
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Cancel