RAM for a File Server

[TwoMoonsComputing]

Hi All,

 

Just after a bit of advice, we are doing some work for a combined secondary and primary school. All files e.g. profiles, home drives, shared areas etc are all on one 2008 R2 file server which originally had 4GB and was paging a lot of the time, slow logins etc. I have no upgraded it to 8GB, seems better, but still paging, slow logins etc. Should 8GB be more than sufficient for 400 computers? Obviously users are logging in all at once, which puts additional strain on the server.

 

Thanks in advance.

[Steve21]

Hi All,

 

Just after a bit of advice, we are doing some work for a combined secondary and primary school. All files e.g. profiles, home drives, shared areas etc are all on one 2008 R2 file server which originally had 4GB and was paging a lot of the time, slow logins etc. I have no upgraded it to 8GB, seems better, but still paging, slow logins etc. Should 8GB be more than sufficient for 400 computers? Obviously users are logging in all at once, which puts additional strain on the server.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

A lot of that would depend on your profiles etc, are you using redirected or full local or roaming etc

 

We run most of file servers will extremely low RAM (Virtual so can increase) currently using 2/4GB for 100 staff, but can increase to 8GB

 

There shouldn't really be that much being pulled from the file server on login apart from profiles.

 

Steve

[tmcd35]

For purely a file server, 4Gb should have been fine - but you can never have too much RAM. What speed NIC does the server have? Is there scope for additional, NIC bonding? What type of hard drives are in use, their speed, are they RAID'd? if so what RAID level is in use? Regardless of how much RAM you put in Windows should be using the page file as a matter of course. Slow logins could easily be a problem somewhere else. What type of profiles are you using? How big are they? Can you use folder redirection to limit their size? What speed are the client connections? Wired/Wireless?

 

Our file server is using just under 8Gb at the moment and I suspect, with our virtualisation layout, it's pulling a heavier workload. Our logins are currently around the 45sec mark.

[3s-gtech]

You may just be finding that it's a lot of work for one disk array. The sheer quantity of separate files that are being loaded (bear in mind that profiles will be unique for each user, so not loaded into RAM until called) would mean that you could be looking at needing significantly more RAM than you have, and it'll still only part solve the problem. What is the existing disk setup?

[TwoMoonsComputing]

Hi We are using roaming profiles with folder redirection, the server is running on a VMWare box with 10Gig link to the SAN.

 

Thanks

[Michael]

For that volume of users and a 10Gbps link to your SAN, you should be looking more at 32GB or possibly even more. RAM is cheap and it's always better to over compensate on available memory. I do agree with the above comments - even with the likes of SAS or Solid State - that many concurrent sessions for one box is asking a lot.

 

To give you an idea, in a lot of the Primaries I support - they're all mostly installed with 8GB-16GB of memory - doing pretty much everything.