Recomendations and Pitfalls

[Mouseclone]

I am getting ready to replace my Scalix server. We plan on using the current server in our DR plan, it may or may not work depending on the configuration.

My question is what is really recommended for 200 users using Scalix connect. No we don't currently have that many users on the server right now but we will have 100 in the next few months and that number will continue to grow. I would like to be prepaired for 3 to 5 years of growth. Although growth is unpredictable, and management can't tell me what the projected increase will be of hired people and store growth will be, I trying to figure for 200 people as that would be double what will be on the server when I finish rolling it out.

I was looking at a HP DL380 G4 or G5 with a dual CPU or Quad CPU, and both rigs in Quad core Xeon procs. How much memory would I need? 4gig? 8gig? more?

Also what is the best setup for the drives? Mirrors? Raid? I would rather have may server safe than something fail and go wrong. I have seen where a mirror is faster but a raid is more redundant. Currently we are at a raid 5 +1. the OS is on the same raid. I have the option of moving the raid to a Mirror and raiding the data store with the new server.

Please also let me know of any pit falls that could occur with either configuration. I really would like to have a high performance server with reliability.

[KevinAnderson]

viewtopic.php?t=7904

Buy Disk.
Then buy Ram.
As a distant last place, worry about a processor/NIC/etc.

Kev.

[Kris]

Just to give an indication of our system:

I've 150 Scalix connect users, 75 IMAP users (about 20 webmail, others Thunderbird). This is running on a dual Xeon 2.0 Ghz system with 4 GB of ram. For disks I have a ARECA SATA raid controller, with four 300GB SATA disks in a RAID 1+0 setup. This works very nice here.

[btisdall]

Those areca cards look intersting Kris - which one are you using as I can't see a mention of 1+0, or is this just a matter of nesting the arrays somewhere in the setup?

Cheers.

[Mouseclone]

Just to give an indication of our system:

I've 150 Scalix connect users, 75 IMAP users (about 20 webmail, others Thunderbird). This is running on a dual Xeon 2.0 Ghz system with 4 GB of ram. For disks I have a ARECA SATA raid controller, with four 300GB SATA disks in a RAID 1+0 setup. This works very nice here.

I assume that you are spanning 2 300s and then mirroring the span?

[adhodgson]

Hi,

Our server is as follows:

PowerEdge 2950 with 1 3GHZ dual-core processor.
4GB RAM
2 80GB SATA disks (RAID-1)
4 500GB SATA disks (RAID-10)
PERC5/I controller

I installed minimal install of RHEL4 on the OS mirror (also contains the swap) and added 2 LVM volumes on the other disks, one for storage and one for backup.

With just over 150 (and growing) UAL users, and 10 standard users, its running without any issues (touching the desk now).

I know the issues with SATA verses SAS, but as I am using RAID-10, am quite happy with the performance of those drives. I can always exchange for SAS at some point in the future if I want, though not sure whether the controller supports both SAS and SCSI - HP always seem to me to be more versatile on the controller configuration than Dell.

Andrew.

[obrodkin]

I have almost identical setup, however I choose to put all 6 disk to RAID 10 and have OS and DATA on the same RAIDed disk. My though is that 6 disk RAID 10 is faster than 4 disk RAID10, so I am gaining time on DATA access while sacrificing some on concurrent OS and DATA write/read.

I am planning to run a script to determine the bulk of file size (16, 32, 64 KB) to tune even futher RAID0 performance