Re: 2 DC's - one getting hammered, one almost idle - why?
I had a very similar one a while ago. Ended up being the profiles, and ours are also manditory but for everyone inc staff.
What spec DC are we talking? I found the bottle neck was the HD read speed so moved the profiles over to the app server which has SCSI RAID5.
You could also copy the profiles to the other server and have them both dishing out profiles. Just change the profile path in AD to %logonserver%\profile
We had ours like the above on 2 DCs running RAID10 but when i moved the profiles to a single SCSI RAID5 server the logon times decreased drematically.
Just remember that accessing lots of little files is far more intensive than accessing few large files. Therefore making sure any unused files in the profiles are deleted could be a big step forward - things like startmenu item's if you run them from your DC.
Re: 2 DC's - one getting hammered, one almost idle - why?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Geoff
I thought the problem was CPU usage not network throughput?
How about a CPU upgrade? Is there a spare socket in the motherboard to go dual processor perhaps?
The other thing would be to move the fileserving to another dedicated server specifically for that purpose.
There may well be a spare socket, but the server is getting replaced by 2 new ones in a few months, but of course staff want improvements *now*
May well consider moving some of the file serving tasks
As for DCDiag, havent got it installed on the 2nd server, have to find the cd, but no errors or warnings running it on the 1st one (the problem one)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chafftech
It probably is a cpu / memory / hard disk bottleneck if you are sure that it is not network bandwidth related.
How many user profiles do you have on that server
1)in total
2)logon at the same time
Probably around 300-400 roaming profiles, which covers all staff and 6th form. Everyone else just uses one mandatory student profile (should I have one for each year?)
Logging on at the same time, unsure, possibly about 200 if you count all the main computer suites logging on at start of lessons
Quote:
Originally Posted by Geoff
Also what sort of size profiles are we talking about?
Mandatory profile is only just over 1mb
Roaming, there are a few large ones but mostly around 10-30mb
Quote:
Originally Posted by j17sparky
What spec DC are we talking? I found the bottle neck was the HD read speed so moved the profiles over to the app server which has SCSI RAID5.
You could also copy the profiles to the other server and have them both dishing out profiles. Just change the profile path in AD to %logonserver%\profile
We had ours like the above on 2 DCs running RAID10 but when i moved the profiles to a single SCSI RAID5 server the logon times decreased drematically.
The DC is over 2 years old, single 2.4Ghz Xeon with 1GB RAM but with a RAID5 array with 10,000RPM drives, so although it does need upgrading, its not awful
I didnt know you could do that with profiles, that looks like it could be brilliant. Will try that on some accounts today.
Also you mention start menus, ours is massive, probably about 200+ items, but is it possible to mirror that too and redirect it to whatever logon server has been used? We use a basic redirected folder in group policy, one for each type of user: staff, pupils, admin etc
Re: 2 DC's - one getting hammered, one almost idle - why?
Quote:
Also you mention start menus, ours is massive, probably about 200+ items, but is it possible to mirror that too and redirect it to whatever logon server has been used? We use a basic redirected folder in group policy, one for each type of user: staff, pupils, admin etc
You can't use the '%logonserver%' variable in the folder redirection settings. The easiest way to get around this is to use a DFS share.
Re: 2 DC's - one getting hammered, one almost idle - why?
I put my start menus in the netlogon share and then just define \\domain\netlogon as the path in GP. That way they are replicated and spread around.
