[sims] Hardware Specs

[nelliott]

Hi All,

 

We are about to make the jump from iSAMS to SIMS, please could you advise the specification of our SIMS servers and if you have had any issues hosting it on virtual servers?

 

Thanks in advance!

[Chuckster]

SIMS is held in a VM on ESXi 5.5. It has an allocation of 5GB RAM and 2 x Processors with 2 cores per processor (4 cores in total).

 

It's been running well for 2 years.

 

Prior to that when SIMS was on Win 2003 it was again in a VM on ESXi 4.1. It had 3GB RAM and 2 x Processors. That ran well for 5 years.

[3s-gtech]

We have had a similar thread recently, worth a search. Ours is:

ESXi 5.5

8 vCPUs

16GB RAM

Dedicated SSDs DAS

Server 2008 R2

Works well enough, with SQL Server set to use 12GB minimum.

[mattstevenson2005]

I'm interested in people's thoughts on running sims in VMware.

 

I have just P2V'ed our sims server (2008 R2) into ESXi 5.5 and have given it 6vCPUs (host has 2x 6 core 2Ghz Xeon CPUs and 260GB RAM) have given the VM 30GB RAM and its running on a raid 5 15k SAS fibre channel SAN volume which is pretty much the only VM on that volume and tbh it's running like a dog! SQL is consuming around 20GB RAM and for the vast majority of the day all vCPUs are running between 80-100% usage. This has been done after a motherboard failure in the previous physical sims server and I had to get it up and running fast! The physical server had 2x 8 core Xeon CPUs with 30GB RAM and it worked flawlessly fast! And I know it's sims causing the issue as out of hours the server and SQL process uses pretty much 0% CPU time. Any suggestions would be great, currently considering buying an additional VMware host to run the VM on independently to give it access to the hosts full resources and adding additional SAN shelves to have SSDs for the VM to run from.

 

Matt

Edited April 21, 2016 by mattstevenson2005

[3s-gtech]

Look at shrinking the DBs in SQL Studio, moving to Simple recovery model. Disk configuration and speed is important but lots of RAM can mitigate this. Our current SIMS server was built as a VM but has been V2Vd since. First time I P2Vd a SIMS server it was horrendous, but the host was under specced.

[SHimmer45]

it will like lots of ram if you are a large school and have alot of users, or sims host has 32GB of ram and is currently using 18.4GB

i havent seen it go over 25% CPU usage in normal day to day running (2x 6 core xeons) the specification is better than what our LEA / Capita recommended at the time and we have just increased the ram to the current level. It also runs discover as well.