Home areas & storage on same server as AD / DNS / DHCP... Bad idea?

[jamin100]

At the moment all our storage areas including home directorys for about 300 users are stored on the DC server that hosts AD, DNS, DHCP and the printers.

 

I'm thinking about moving them across to another server over the holiday.

 

They currently sit on a s2k3 server, dual core xeon 3ghz, 2GB RAM, 300GB RAID 5. I have about 50GB of space left.

 

I have a spare (ish) server which is just hosting some light network applications. The server in question is a xeon 3ghz 2GB RAM 500GB RAID 1.

 

I'm wondering if I should up the RAM in each machine to 4GB, then upgrade the 2nd server to s2k8 and host all the user files on there away from my DC.

 

We're only a primary school so I dont think i need a SAN or SCSI drives. We have about 500 users (but some are class logins) with 150 XP clients. We plan to move to Windows 7 sometime in 2011 (probably the summer)

 

What do you think?

My other plan involves replacing the DC with a much beefier server with around 6-8GB RAM and server 2008...

[plexer]

We currently run 2 DC's and the home folders are on those machines as well as AD/DNS/DHCP, I have a seperate 2003 server for printers though.

 

Ben

[srochford]

If you're going to move, do it the other way!

 

AD, DHCP, DNS are all very lightweight. file serving is not so it really wants the highest spec machine.

[sted]

in an ideal world you would have a server for each role (except stuff like ad that can be shared round and works better that way). in the real world almsot all the sites i support have a single server for everything. 2 have 2 real servers 1 acting as a print server (2008 drivers for the photocopier werent happening at the time i may revisit that when i get 64 bit workstations and have one 64 bit print server and one 32)/ad/dns and running abacus as it wont run on a modern os, the other just runs wsus/ad/dns/again 64 bit printers as the main server was running low on space and the old admin server isnt a terrible spec and was sat on the floor doing nothing