New SIMS Server Spec

[TLARWise]

We are currently considering changing our MIS from IntegrisS2 to SIMS and I have been asked to spec up a suitable server so they can get an idea of all the costs involved.

 

We are a secondary school with a little over 1000 students and around 120 staff.

 

I am currently considering the following spec (server will be dedicated to SIMS only):

Intel E5-2620 V3 CPU (single processor)

32GB DDR4 Memory (4 x 8GB)

Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard

SQL Server 2014 Standard

 

However I am not sure what the better option for storage will be, 15K SAS drives, Enterprise SSD SATA drives or Enterprise 7.2K SATA drives. If SATA then should I use a seperate RAID controller card or will the standard SATA ports on the motherboard be good enough (is there a significant speed difference between the options)?

 

What sort of storage capacity should I be looking at, I need to be sure we have enough free space to keep us going for around 5 years of usage but don't want to over do it.

 

Would RAID 1 or 5 be better?

 

I will most likely be using Hyper V Core with a single VM, would I be better off installing the core os on a separate disk and store the VM on another or will a single volume work fine?

 

Any advice would be helpful.

 

Thanks

[Moos3h]

We're using RAID10 on enterprise SSDs and it's made a BIG difference. It's the only VM on a Hyper-V 2012R2 host and performance is pretty good - it's not fast, but that's SIMS for you! Our Core OS is over a couple of SAS drives in RAID 1 so the VM has the SSDs to itself.

[TLARWise]

We're using RAID10 on enterprise SSDs and it's made a BIG difference. It's the only VM on a Hyper-V 2012R2 host and performance is pretty good - it's not fast, but that's SIMS for you! Our Core OS is over a couple of SAS drives in RAID 1 so the VM has the SSDs to itself.

 

What capacity and model of SSD's are you using?

 

Once a server is booted is there much disk access going on on the hyper v host or is all access on the VM disk. Ie: if I install the Hyper V Core OS on a slower 7.2K Sata disk and put the SIMS VM on a SAS 15K or SSD disk would the slower drive affect the performance of accessing the higher speed VM drive?

[Moos3h]

We have five 200Gb SSDs and they are rebadged Dell ones (Intel SSDs) - I've not done a huge amount of work on the subject, but once the host is up, it doesn't seem to hammer the SAS disks, even when the VM is busy - that's partly going to be because we have so much RAM in the thing (64Gb in the host, 32Gb for the VM) I guess!