Morning, Now before someone directs me to and old post - I’ve read them all before posting. Yes this topic has been covered before but I feel the older topics are no longer relevant to my situation, and to most situations since they all refer to very old versions and hardware does move on at a serious pace. Anyway here is what I’m after; I’m looking at a Navision implementation at the company I work for, It will be based around 150 concurrent connections with planned expansion at no more than 200 within 36 months. The users are made up of a 2 to 1 ratio of LAN / WAN users (ie 100 LAN 50 WAN), the WAN users will access the system via a TS server. My hardware / software spec idea is currently this; Server 2k3 x64 standard + SQL 2005 x64 Standard HPDL585 4 x Opteron 2.4ghs Dual Core Chips 16gb of Ram (with space to go to 32gb) RAID 1 with 2 disks for OS RAID 0 with 2 disks for log RAID 10 with 10 disks for database <— this is the area I’m really not sure of. Anyway basically my VAR have said the spec is fine but I was hoping for a second opinion. Thanks in advance! comdot PS if this could not deginerate into a x64 versus x86 argument I’d appreciate it!
I think you should put everything on RAID10. SQL2005 is only officially supported for 4.0 SP1, and I do not know if 64 is included in that support.
I would mirror the logical disks for both the OS and logs. I rather have safety over speed. There might be reason to put the swap file on it’s own physical disk, to reduce head contention. I don’t know how much Navision uses the swap file. As you indicate, the db is the wild card. - For a SINGLE file a RAID-10 works fine, but - If you split the db into multiple files, then you should put each file onto it’s own mirrored disk (to minimize head contention). Besides the server also consider the network and the client. If the user would be running reports, you want a FAST pipe between the server and the users. A LOT of the report processing is done on the client and not the server, so there will be a lot of data moving over the network. For heavy report users, especially if they use Jet, a FAST PC with LOTS of RAM. Why…I have a Jet Report that runs 15minutes! When you open an Excel file that is configured for Jet, it will immediately launch the extract and processing. Watching PERFMON, more than half the time is local processing of the data. gud luk Gary