sims.net running on Virtual Server 2005r2 ???

[leonard.powers]

Hi All,

 

We're thinking of implementing Virtual Server 2005 to see about virtualising some of our existing old servers etc. I'm wondering how sims would run on a virtual server. I suspect most people will say SQL will hammer the machine to bits but what if we were to run just 1 virtual machine on a server. No other virtual machine sessions. The real benefit then is that if the server died, we could fire up the sims virtual machine on another server to get us out of the problem. It'll be slow but downtime would be minutes.

 

Server spec I'm thinking is something like

 

Dell PowerEdge 1950

2 x Quad core 2GHZ Xeons

16GB Ram

10K SAS disks

 

Surely quick enough for just a single sims virtual machine?

 

Any thoughts on this?

 

Thanks

[robknowles]

Hello,

 

That would be quite a decent spec server, though I would go with 15K RPM HDDs if possible in a RAID 10 Configuration for the VM Images and couple of seperate RAID 1 HDDs for Windows and the Virtual server to be installed to. I've never touched Virtual Server to be honest, but run VMWare ESX Server (which I think is better as that doesn't run on top of an existing operating system that MS Virtual Server does). As a comparison I run ESX on a 2 x Quad Core 2.33Ghz with 8GB Ram (soon going to 24gb ram!) and that runs about 12 virtual machines fine, including our old SIMS Install (sadly we are with CMIS at the moment but that's another story). SQL is quite taxing on resources but if you just running 1 VM then fine but to be honest you could probably put a few other VM on there as still have some spare capacity. That said my personal preference would be to have SQL Server on it's own dedicated server (like I have here) and run all the databases you have off that.

 

But with all that said yes that specification would be more than sufficient (you will need Windows 2003 Enterprise to take advantage of that ram, and go for the 64bit edition as well if Virtual Server supports it.

 

Thanks,

 

Rob

[webman]

You would also be better off performance and resource-wise to run a bare linux install (Debian/Ubuntu) as the host for VMWare Server.