[sims] Whats your SIMS hardware spec

[newpersn]

We are looking at upgrading our sims server soon. (4gb of ram.... seems to falling over now)

 

Just would like to know what hardware you are running sims on? (and if your running physical or virtual)

 

Thanks

 

Newp

[eyetea]

Virtual, 16GB Ram

[3s-gtech]

What version of SQL Server are you using (full or Express)?

 

Ours is virtual, 30GB RAM, 8 cores, 8 drive RAID 10 in the host.

[newpersn]

This is will be 2012 Full (guessing)

[pantscat]

@3s-gtech does having that much RAM really make much of a difference?

 

Edit to say - we have a virtual 2008R2 box running SQL 2008, 16GB RAM and 4 vCPU.

Edited October 22, 2014 by pantscat

[localzuk]

We've got it running a a VM which has 16GB RAM assigned to it, and has access to all 16 cores of a dual Xeon E5-2690 processor server. The disk image is also running from SSD.

 

To be honest, I'm still disappointed with the performance of it all - the client itself seems to be the bit slowing everything down now. Opening the client on my machine, which is a i7-4770k with 16GB RAM and an SSD still takes 10 seconds to launch, and a search in the quick search box takes 10 seconds+ too. But hey, that's just me being fussy.

[siuko]

Our school has approx 1500 students

Our sims.mdf is 5.86gb

 

We are running Sims on Windows Server 2012 and SQL 2012. We also run the InTouch service on the same server.

The server has 2 x 8 Core Opteron 4386 Processors (16 Cores total) and 64Gb Ram

 

On average the processor usage is between about 20-50% and the total server ram usage hits about 19Gb.

[3s-gtech]

No idea if it needs 30GB really, SQL Server can cache all of it (and I have it manually set to do so). It's pretty quick though. No other VMs on this host so I just threw everything at it. The disk speed is pretty important, but I was always told to give it as much RAM as possible. So I did both!

[JRowley]

SQL is a bit of a funny piece of kit, it will use as much ram as it possibly can (if you let it) so you can put in 64GB of ram and it will try and use 64GB of ram. It will cache lookups in memory to speed up access, eventually of course it will cache everything so you will top out.

 

The big problem with SIMS is the way it compiles reports, it does it all manually with lots of lookups it doesn't utilise SQL's reporting tools or features. So yeah basically the client queries the database directly and compiles the report as it goes making the database inefficient as it's not using the right tools for the job and making the client inefficient as it's building the reports and waiting on each query to come back before submitting the next one.

[SHimmer45]

Dell Poweredge 510 couple of quad Xeons and 16GB ram (not 100% if its fully using it as depending on the version you have of SQL and the OS there are limitations to max ram)

Server 2008 Enterprise X86 on the advice of our LEA (it does see all of the installed ram joy of PAE)

Edited October 22, 2014 by SHimmer45

[Daednu]

for the RAM, the general rule of thumb is found by a quick equation:

 

Total size of all databases + 2gb for expansion + 2-3gb for OS.

Obviously if you have a load of databases, you may need to increase the expansion part.

 

For the processor, a quad core 2.4ghz should be sufficient

[Arthur]

The big problem with SIMS is the way it compiles reports, it does it all manually with lots of lookups

Does that mean you should try to get the fastest processors possible for your SIMS server?

 

Would SSDs be beneficial?

[synaesthesia]

Dual Xeon 5520, 56GB RAM, RAID10 15K SAS drives, physical.

 

Could run SIMS on a Cray and it would still appear slow.

[JRowley]

Does that mean you should try to get the fastest processors possible for your SIMS server?

 

Would SSDs be beneficial?

 

Since lookups basically search through physical database files the bottleneck would be disc read speed, so I guess 2 SSDs in RAID 1, or 4 in RAID 10 if you want that level of redundancy would be the most optimal. The processors probably won't help as much as you would think, don't skimp by any means, but you don't really need to go overboard.

 

The main bottle neck isn't hardware really, though the higher the spec the faster it will go to a point. Because the reports are done manually, you will find that people inserting large amounts of data into the database, or extremely complex queries, will actually block lookups for other people. It's not easily avoidable, we are moving the database to a separate server which is dedicated to our sql databases.

 

What I think is extremely strange in Sims' design is the fact that all the client does is connect straight to the database. This causes numerous problems and what they need to do is have it connect to a Sims software server. That could then optimise and group queries and inserts to improve performance. But other than that they really need to do reporting correctly.

Edited October 24, 2014 by JRowley

[10101010]

We've got it running a a VM which has 16GB RAM assigned to it, and has access to all 16 cores of a dual Xeon E5-2690 processor server. The disk image is also running from SSD.

 

Hi localzuk, what was the spec of the SSD you used for your VM SIMS server?

[localzuk]

I didn't spec the SSDs - they were bought before I arrived back here (they were originally specced for IOPS for a whole site VDI solution, but that idea was scrapped). We have 16x HP 100GB 3G SATA MLC Enterprise drives in our storage solution.

[DMcCoy]

Seeing as most people are using way more than SQL express will support (1 socket, 1GB RAM) how are people licensing SQL 2012. CAL, or per socket? The virtualisation licensing terms got a bit worse with 2012 :|

[3s-gtech]

This year, per core. Previous year, CALs.

[siuko]

We went per core for ease of licensing... but with 16 cores it ended up rather expensive lol

[localzuk]

We get CALs under OVS-ES/EES, so we only have to buy enough to cover our staff. Works out pretty cheap.

[10101010]

another vote for CALs under EES, much cheaper.

[Edu-IT]

Hang on... if I have the CAL's, does that mean I don't need to buy SQL Server licensing? :-S

 

We have:

 

Servers SQL - User CAL 2014

Servers SQL Server - Standard 2014

Edited December 9, 2014 by Edu-IT

[localzuk]

Hang on... if I have the CAL's, does that mean I don't need to buy SQL Server licensing? :-S

 

Yup. If you have SQL CALs, you don't have to then license the SQL server too.

[Edu-IT]

Yup. If you have SQL CALs, you don't have to then license the SQL server too.

Well... well... well...

 

Is that a recent thing?

[localzuk]

Always been that way as far as I can remember!