New Server Requirements

[tl82]

Hi,

 

Just a quick question regarding a new server. If you had the option, would you double the memory in your servers?

 

I have had a quote for a new physical server with 2 processors that comes with 16gb memory. The server is going to host 2 vm's, the school file server and SIMS server. 2 processors should be fine, its the memory that I can't make my mind up on right now. The 2 servers are currently on their own physical server right now and are showing their age.

 

Should I go with 16gb for the whole new system or for an extra £200 get 32gb in total? Or is 32gb overkill for a large infant school?

[Steve21]

RAMs never overkill, as you're never going to know what you get hit with until you start playing and then can turn on fancies like deduplication etc if you have "spare" RAM

 

Steve

[ICTDirect_Dave]

Always more RAM!

 

If you don't use it now you can always use it later. And it's often relatively cheap to tag some more on (although £200 seems a little dear for 16GB).

[yac2016]

I would go with 32gb RAM, will you be using HyperV or VMware, we are doing Dell servers at around 2K with 5 years warranties at the moment for primaries.

[dhicks]

Should I go with 16gb for the whole new system or for an extra £200 get 32gb in total? Or is 32gb overkill for a large infant school?

 

I'd go for at least 32GB, if not more if you can - even if you don't do anything fancy, just assign any spare RAM to the file server and Windows will use any otherwise unused RAM as a cache.

[JackCPickup]

Hi,

 

Just a quick question regarding a new server. If you had the option, would you double the memory in your servers?

 

I have had a quote for a new physical server with 2 processors that comes with 16gb memory. The server is going to host 2 vm's, the school file server and SIMS server. 2 processors should be fine, its the memory that I can't make my mind up on right now. The 2 servers are currently on their own physical server right now and are showing their age.

 

Should I go with 16gb for the whole new system or for an extra £200 get 32gb in total? Or is 32gb overkill for a large infant school?

 

Howcome 2 processors with just 2 VMs?

[tl82]

Thanks for the advice. Think I'll go with 32gb as it'll probably needed for remote desktops, etc in the future- the more the better.

[XiJ]

I’m just spec’ing up a server for someone. Just 2 VM’s I think and one is going to be SIMS. 32gb here.

 

Incidentally - what sort of licensing costs you getting ?

[yac2016]

I’m just spec’ing up a server for someone. Just 2 VM’s I think and one is going to be SIMS. 32gb here.

 

Incidentally - what sort of licensing costs you getting ?

 

If you have an OVS agreement you can add in the server core element to this at any time.

 

Depends on the cores for licensing but with minimum of 8 per processor it would be around £140ex VAT to license the host and to VM's using HyperV, plus CAL's for devices.

[mukz]

If you have 2 cpus, 2 x 16gb is better for performance

[supawat1]

More RAM Memory would be nice, but you may have to consider the limitation of SQL server too, from my guessing, you will be installing SQL express 2016 edition for your SIMS, which will have memory limit to 1GB and 4 cores of CPU.

 

So having 2 CPUs will be overkill for your workload for just 2 VMs and also you will have to pay more for your server licensing to cover those two processors.

 

In my opinion, 1 x (8 Cores) Processor will be more than enough with 16GB. I think your main bottleneck to consider is your storage, so please spend more money on SSD storage to provide fast read and write to your SQL and Files Server.

 

It is no point of having a high spec server with low-speed HDD SATA drive.

[SchoolFibre_Paul]

More RAM is always good from a future proofing perspective. You never know what else it may come in handy for in the future with technology always changing.

 

I do agree with Supawat1 though, you need to ensure that other areas such as the storage will not act as a bottleneck.