Server spec for pupil's home folders

[anne1]

We have home folders for our 1500 pupils and their roaming profiles on a 4 year old dual xeon 2.4ghz server with 3gb ram, we run Ranger (but not on this server) and the profiles are about 8mb each. At some change of lessons we are getting the cpu usage going up to 100% as up to 200 kids log on. It goes down to 2% in between times but logons are slowing down because of this. Is it time to buy a new server, what spec? Or any other suggestions?

 

Thanks

[mattx]

You just have one server authenticating logons ?

You need some load balancing or change over to mandatory profiles....

[anne1]

Sorry, I wasn't clear, we have 4 dc'a but as all the home folders are on this one server I think that must be what is causing the cpu to get stressed?

[mattx]

What speed is your network ? I would hope 100 meg ? Plus its all switched ? [ I hope ]

200 kids logging on - AV running on the server ? Largish Profiles ? Hmmmm -

[localzuk]

I would suggest having more than one server... Probably 2 or 3. I would also have them connected to a SAN and use DFS to serve up the actual UNC paths. That way, you have a high speed infrastructure for the actual files, then you have a distributed way to actually let the kids access them - it ain't gonna be cheap though.

[anne1]

We have gigabit backbone and 100mb switched network, the issue does seem to be the cpu going to 100%. What do other schools do with pupil's profiles and home folders? Have them on one server or spread across several?

 

Thanks for ideas so far

[richard.thomas]

We have all our student folders on one server. All the staff files are on our NAS, Student files will prob get moved there over the summer. We don't have an issue with the CPU on our student file server tho.

[CyberNerd]

do you limit the profile size? I think this may be the issue because the students profiles get too large (files on desktop...)

We use mandatory profiles and can cope with 200-300 simultaneous logins. - the fileserver that hold the profiles and students data is dual P3 1.2Ghz 1GB ram 1Gb/s U160 SCSI.

[localzuk]

We have gigabit backbone and 100mb switched network, the issue does seem to be the cpu going to 100%. What do other schools do with pupil's profiles and home folders? Have them on one server or spread across several?

 

Thanks for ideas so far

 

We have a single file server here - but we only have 600 pupils. It is a 12 month old dual cpu, dual core xeon 2.2Ghz though, with 2GB Ram. It connects to an iSCSI NAS/SAN box (well, it is a fake SAN really) for storage space (which is an adaptec SNAP Server 520 with 2TB storage).

 

It also runs Oliver for our library and software such as expo eletro. I wouldn't want to load anything else onto it though...

 

do you limit the profile size? I think this may be the issue because the students profiles get too large (files on desktop...)

We use mandatory profiles and can cope with 200-300 simultaneous logins. - the fileserver that hold the profiles and students data is dual P3 1.2Ghz 1GB ram 1Gb/s U160 SCSI.

 

We have mandatory profiles for the kids, and this works out at 1.58Mb in size. So it handles it very well.

[Guest Guest]

Like said, eithger spend big money on a SAN/more servers, or use mandatory profiles.

 

We use mandatory profiles and logging on at peak times is hardly any differant to non-peak, and we've never had top of the range servers.

[FN-GM]

I would use mandatory and keep everything nice and simple, all pupils desktops will be the same plus you save the diskspacer used for roaming profiles.

[mrphil]

check your antivirus to see if its on-access canning will thrash the server maybe worth changing to just a couple of scans a day