rrafluap Posted January 14, 2017 Posted January 14, 2017 Hi, We are going to be hosting our SIMS install locally from April (currently hosted and supported elsewhere) and wondered if there was a list of recommended specs for the server that SIMS support would provide you with? Want to get everything bought, up and running ready so that we can just install and transfer the data etc... If anyone has any info on this i'd be very grateful as it would make me feel a little more prepared! Thanks, Paul
snagrat Posted January 14, 2017 Posted January 14, 2017 Really? You moving away from Scomis. How come?
rrafluap Posted January 14, 2017 Author Posted January 14, 2017 Really? You moving away from Scomis. How come? Cost, flexibility and because most things that I cant answer for our staff, SCoMIS usually have to ask Capita anyway.
snagrat Posted January 14, 2017 Posted January 14, 2017 Cost, flexibility and because most things that I cant answer for our staff, SCoMIS usually have to ask Capita anyway. Who you planning on using for support then? Not Scomis by the sounds of it
rrafluap Posted January 14, 2017 Author Posted January 14, 2017 We're going direct with Capita. For us it's a £2-3k saving overall.
ajevanu2 Posted January 14, 2017 Posted January 14, 2017 Hi, We spoke to Stone and got a decent server for our SIMS setup through them. Didn't cost as much as other suppliers and was easy to setup with SIMS. Depends on your needs. Came with 3yr onsite warranty so was covered.
ItsOggy Posted January 14, 2017 Posted January 14, 2017 Server specs as always depend on users and size of DB, amount of load, but I'll give mine as an example. I run SIMS on a 2012r2 VM with SQL 2014: 2 x vCPU 8 GB Ram I'm not running discover, you'll probably want to double your spec for that! 1
rrafluap Posted January 14, 2017 Author Posted January 14, 2017 I'm thinking of getting the additional server and running it as a VM... we only have one server that supports virtualisation but thats or main DC so don't want to overload it. Plus the backing up etc is easier that way. We have about 670 pupils and I guess no more than 25 users at one time (registration time) so nothing extreme!
ITGURU Posted January 15, 2017 Posted January 15, 2017 I'm thinking of getting the additional server and running it as a VM... we only have one server that supports virtualisation but thats or main DC so don't want to overload it. Plus the backing up etc is easier that way. We have about 670 pupils and I guess no more than 25 users at one time (registration time) so nothing extreme! As always, overspec a server above the requirements. We have and always will run sims on a physical server . The key for sims speed I make sure it's local storage. If your running the vm disk on 1gb SAN you will have poor disk performance. This was discovered when we were told our Sims is faster than another schools. Our report for data collection on 900 students runs in 4 minutes maximum. On another schools running is as virtual on 1gb San it takes over 30 minutes so physical is the way to go.
samgray96 Posted January 15, 2017 Posted January 15, 2017 (edited) Does anyone else have a problem with sims being slow as hell? Our vm specs are 8vcpu and 32gb ram and it's still really really slow, any ideas or is that just was sims is like? Edited January 15, 2017 by samgray96
ITGURU Posted January 15, 2017 Posted January 15, 2017 Does anyone else have a problem with sims being slow as hell? Our vm specs are 8vcpu and 32gb ram and it's still really really slow, any ideas or is that just was sims is like? Your need it on a Physical server and local storage. Tests reveal on 1gb SAN links you get disk performance of a single hard drive 70-80MB/s - on local storage we get 300MB/s + on RAID 10. 1
rrafluap Posted January 15, 2017 Author Posted January 15, 2017 Are there any recommended specs for the physical servers then?
ITGURU Posted January 15, 2017 Posted January 15, 2017 Capita has a minimum system requirements document on the myaccount support site, but we've always overspec'd so it lasts. We've been running SIMS on a Dual CPU 6 core server with 16GB ram since 2014. It also runs Discover and utilities that export from SIMS into others such as Samlearning etc. Also run a couple of other admin programs. SIMS is heavily used in secondary school installed on 70+ PCs.
samgray96 Posted January 15, 2017 Posted January 15, 2017 But we're not running through SAN, it's the servers local raid that it's running from? 1
ITGURU Posted January 15, 2017 Posted January 15, 2017 But we're not running through SAN, it's the servers local raid that it's running from? What specifically is slow? From the built in reports, run the report for 'data collection sheets' for the whole school on role and see how long it takes.
samgray96 Posted January 15, 2017 Posted January 15, 2017 (edited) What specifically is slow? From the built in reports, run the report for 'data collection sheets' for the whole school on role and see how long it takes. Well the report found ran for 4 mins 40 secs and then stated system error out of memory but i'm not 100% sure it was the report you mean as it said it was an "imported" one Also what is slow is everything from logging in on a workstation to searching for students and reports, a typical search will take anywhere from 1 min to 5 mins in extreme cases, logging in can take up to 10 mins in some cases, all workstations are on GbE Edited January 15, 2017 by samgray96
3s-gtech Posted January 15, 2017 Posted January 15, 2017 SIMS is fine run from a VM, be careful conjecturing here. When I migrated it last (from ESXi to Hyper-V) I whacked SSDs into the host as a new array purely for SIMS to use. Never used a SAN, 1Gb or otherwise, to know what performance would be like.
forkies Posted January 15, 2017 Posted January 15, 2017 We run a dedicated SQL server (in ESXi) and it uses local storage, sims DB runs off SSDs. We have a separate server VM for the sims "apps" and share. The sql server is specd up to run multiple SQL instances and some medium usage DBs. Don't see any performance issues running it on a VM compared to physical. I would recommend fast local storage, and calculate RAM based on what other DBs you will be storing. Depending on how you license your SQL server you will want to take the cost per processor core into consideration. Agreed networked storage is going to provide poor performance as after all it is a SQL DB.
smithson83 Posted January 15, 2017 Posted January 15, 2017 Sorry to hijack... But I currently transfering our old physical server roles in to a cluster. Our SAN will run on a 10Gbps isolated iSCSI network. The plan was to have all our servers running from this SAN (13x 900GB 10k SAS, with room for expansion). Would you guys still reccomend against putting our Sims server in the cluster? (assuming all other basic services running from there also. 1000 pupil secondary, low to average PC use, 500 pcs, 70 with Sims, Sims dB ~ 9GB RAM)
Banjo Posted January 16, 2017 Posted January 16, 2017 We run a dedicated SQL server (in ESXi) and it uses local storage, sims DB runs off SSDs. We have a separate server VM for the sims "apps" and share. The sql server is specd up to run multiple SQL instances and some medium usage DBs. Don't see any performance issues running it on a VM compared to physical. I would recommend fast local storage, and calculate RAM based on what other DBs you will be storing. Depending on how you license your SQL server you will want to take the cost per processor core into consideration. Agreed networked storage is going to provide poor performance as after all it is a SQL DB. If you are going down the VM route this is what I'd do. You can run the whole of SIMS off one VM, just use fast local storage.
3s-gtech Posted January 16, 2017 Posted January 16, 2017 In theory, with plenty of RAM, SQL will load the entire DB into memory so the disk speed becomes less of an issue once it has been on for a while. In practice, it will still create a bottleneck at times. It's difficult to directly recommend one way or the other - it'll be faster with less less impact on the other server if you use local storage, but your redundancy and failover will be affected. Best bet is to test performance on both platforms and weigh it up.
ricki Posted January 16, 2017 Posted January 16, 2017 (edited) Specs for SIM servers are huge because SQL is a ram hog and will grab all it can making the server run slow Sent from my ONEPLUS A3003 using EduGeek mobile app Edited January 16, 2017 by ricki
Blue_Cookeh Posted January 16, 2017 Posted January 16, 2017 (edited) Specs for SIM servers are huge because SQL is a ram hog and will grab all it can making the server run slow Sent from my ONEPLUS A3003 using EduGeek mobile app You should be setting the RAM limits in the SQL Server config so this doesn't happen, though. I'm not sure why people would worry about this, so long as your VM infrastructure is sound there's no reason NOT to run SQL server in a VM. We ran an MDM using MS SQL Server with 10,000 client devices checking in at a previous job without local storage and there were no issues (apart from the SQL Server witness server being crap). Edited January 16, 2017 by Blue_Cookeh
ITGURU Posted January 16, 2017 Posted January 16, 2017 Well the report found ran for 4 mins 40 secs and then stated system error out of memory but i'm not 100% sure it was the report you mean as it said it was an "imported" one Also what is slow is everything from logging in on a workstation to searching for students and reports, a typical search will take anywhere from 1 min to 5 mins in extreme cases, logging in can take up to 10 mins in some cases, all workstations are on GbE That doesn't sound good at all for searches. Have you monitored system resources whilst it's running? CPU, RAM, Disk usage etc.
ITGURU Posted January 16, 2017 Posted January 16, 2017 Specs for SIM servers are huge because SQL is a ram hog and will grab all it can making the server run slow Sent from my ONEPLUS A3003 using EduGeek mobile app Not totally true - Within SQL Management studio you can configure the maximum amount of RAM to use for SQL. Our server has 24GB, DB is 11GB so I set it to use no more than 16GB RAM so the entire database can be stored in RAM.
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