Buying Server- how's this?

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TechieSooner

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Buying a rackmount server... Usual systems are from Dell, wanted input on this to see if anyone would change something or go a different route.

This system will basically run BES/Exchange.
I know Dell's quotations are kindof a PITA to read so what the below is as far as hard disks are 1TB RAID 5 with 1 hot spare.

I'd prefer to buy new, as I generally cannot buy a long warranty buying refurbished.

Below is what I've got quoted at $3500.
Quad Core Xeon Processor E54202x6MB Cache, 2.5GHz, 1333MHz FSB, PE2900 4GB 667MHz (4X1GB), Dual Ranked Fully Buffered DIMMs
LOM NICs are TOE Ready
250GB 7.2K RPM Serial ATA 3Gbps 3.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive
PERC6i SAS RAID Controller Internal with Battery
No Floppy Drive
Windows Server 2008, Standard Edition, Includes 5 CALs
ONBOARD BROADCOM 5708 1GBE NETWORKING
16X DVD-ROM for PowerEdge 2900
Tower Bezel Included
Electronic Documentation and OpenManage DVD Kit
250GB 7.2K RPM Serial ATA 3Gbps 3.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive
Integrated SAS/SATA RAID 5 PERC 6/i Integrated
Tower Chassis Orientation
Redundant Power Supply with Y-Cord for PowerEdge 2900
Power Cord, NEMA 5-15P to C14,15 amp, wall plug, 10 feet / 3 meter
Pro Support for IT: Next Business Day Onsite Service After Problem Diagnosis, 2Year Extended
Pro Support for IT: Next Business Day Onsite Service After Problem Diagnosis, Initial Year
Dell Hardware Warranty, Extended Year(s)
Dell Hardware Warranty Plus Onsite Service Initial YR
ProSupport for IT: 7x24 HW / SW Tech Support and Assistance for Certified IT Staff, 3 Year
341-3037 1 250GB 7.2K RPM Serial ATA 3Gbps 3.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive
341-3037 1 250GB 7.2K RPM Serial ATA 3Gbps 3.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive
341-3037 1 250GB 7.2K RPM Serial ATA 3Gbps 3.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive
Click to expand...
 
Personally i would ditch the prosupport, just go witht he 3 year onsite,

Pro support is expensive and i have never used it.

Do you have a dell gold team to get a quote from.

Also, what version of exchange are you running.
 
k1pp3r said:
Personally i would ditch the prosupport, just go witht he 3 year onsite,
Pro support is expensive and i have never used it.
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Ahhh, never thought of that. I should start using that from now on.

What's the difference? May need to have them explain the different options to me.

k1pp3r said:
Do you have a dell gold team to get a quote from.
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Don't know what a "gold team" is but I've got an account team that's comprised of a server person, peripheral person, desktop person, etc...

k1pp3r said:
Also, what version of exchange are you running.
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At first? 2003. After I know it's running smoothly I'll be upgrading it to 2007.
 
Unless this will be a very light load on the Exchange server I'd ditch those SATA drives and go with some SAS drives. Generally speaking SATA=Not enterprise level. Also, you can probably go lower on the processor power for what its' going to do. I've got no problem with you going with what you've got, but seriously, ditch those SATA drives and go for some SAS drives. You'll be glad you did. Also I'd go with something better for the network adapters than the integrated Broadcom NICs.

And since most companies and most people seem to keep a ton of intellectual company property in E-Mails I'd suggest investing in a backup solution. (RAID is NOT a backup solution.) You might also want to establish set mail boxe sizes now and stick with them. Otherwise you'll have some individuals with mail boxes that are out of control. This will come back and haunt you later I promise you.
 
Dan_D said:
Ditch those SATA drives and go for some SAS drives. You'll be glad you did. Also I'd go with something better for the network adapters than the integrated Broadcom NICs.
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Noted!
Dan_D said:
RAID is NOT a backup solution.
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Never said it was ;)

Hotspare is there simply because the HDDs are the #1 point of failure, so it's purely a redundancy measure, not a backup.

Dan_D said:
You might also want to establish set mail boxe sizes now and stick with them. Otherwise you'll have some individuals with mail boxes that are out of control. This will come back and haunt you later I promise you.
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Already got them set. For me it came down to the fact if I doubled everyone's sizes, they'd complain next year (if not sooner) about the same thing: "I just can't do with so little space!!"
 
definately go with SAS over SATA.

Also, why implement Exchange 2003 if you are planning on upgrading to 2007 anyway?? Just go with 2007 to start with and make your life easier and save some cash! :D
 
Captain Colonoscopy said:
definately go with SAS over SATA.

Also, why implement Exchange 2003 if you are planning on upgrading to 2007 anyway?? Just go with 2007 to start with and make your life easier and save some cash! :D
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I agree. Many people completely overlook disk performance and choose SATA drives because they are larger and cheaper. They probably don't see anything wrong with them because they work fine in their desktops not really knowing what the differences really are.
 
What are you going to do with this box?
 
Captain Colonoscopy said:
definately go with SAS over SATA.

Also, why implement Exchange 2003 if you are planning on upgrading to 2007 anyway?? Just go with 2007 to start with and make your life easier and save some cash! :D
Click to expand...

Because I've got to use the SBS Transition Pack, which will just give me Exchange 2003 to start with... Unless I can transition the Exchange 2003 from box A onto Exchange 2007 on box B in one step, didn't think about that...
 
you don't need 2003 exchabge on the new box at all. Just join it to the domain, run the adprep crap to update your schema and then install 2007 on the new server. replicate your public folders and move your mailboxes to the new server. then uninstall exchange 2003 from your old server, remove from domain. done. don't over complicate things. MS has plenty of good articles and walkthroughs on how to transition to 2007.
 
LoStMaTt said:
Exchange 2007 can only run on 64-bit Server too am I right?

Just checking.
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I don't know if that's the case but at this point in time you should be running a 64bit anyway. Exchange likes RAM and though you can use more than 4GB with the PAE workaround, a 64bit OS that doesn't need to use PAE will offer better performance.
 
Captain Colonoscopy said:
you don't need 2003 exchabge on the new box at all. Just join it to the domain, run the adprep crap to update your schema and then install 2007 on the new server. replicate your public folders and move your mailboxes to the new server. then uninstall exchange 2003 from your old server, remove from domain. done. don't over complicate things. MS has plenty of good articles and walkthroughs on how to transition to 2007.
Click to expand...
I've never used adprep before.

This is a whole new territory for me. I can implement a new network and join servers to it all day, but this transitioning between SBS and moving Exchange around the network has me having a little stage freight so to speak.

So I run adprep on the current DC, or the new Exchange box?
How do I replicate my public folders to the new box?
Same question for mailboxes. Do all the current rules and whatnot carry over?

EDIT- Guess I'm derailing my own thread, made separate one for the actual transfer here: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1365885



slowbiznatch said:
You might want to read RIM's documentation on running BES directly on an Exchange server.
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Yea, I remember looking at that awhile back. Called RIM and they said it works just fine, just a matter of setting it up correctly (which is a PITA in itself).


So right now I need to look at my warranty options, switch to SAS, and upgrade NICs? Any reason for the upgraded NIC? I don't run Gigabit or anything at the moment.
What about RAM? Is that sufficient?
 
Dan_D said:
I don't know if that's the case but at this point in time you should be running a 64bit anyway. Exchange likes RAM and though you can use more than 4GB with the PAE workaround, a 64bit OS that doesn't need to use PAE will offer better performance.
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PAE only works to applications that can utlize it. It will do nothing for E2003. How many users are you going to have on exchange and how many BES users ? BES users can cause 3-4x number of IOPS on E2003 over a non-BES users. I agree with the others just go straight for E2007. Unless you have extra hardware becuase there is no way to do an in-place upgrade from E2003 > E2007.

E2007 requires x64 cpu's and x64 windows. Depending on your user base you may want to increase your ram.


http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/01/15/432207.aspx

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/09/25/428994.aspx

http://thebackroomtech.com/2007/12/03/exchange-2007-server-sizing-resources/
 
TechieSooner said:
Planning on 75-100 for now.
BES users, maybe half that.
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You maybe pushing it right off the bad with a raid 5 SATA.

Micosoft says .5 IOPS/Mailbox for moderate users and .5-1.5 for heavy outlook users. BES can be 3.0-4.0.

RAID 5 you going to be giving up 2 extra IOPS to parity which is why exchange DB is reccommend on RAID 0+1(or 10). SATA disks can only do a sustains avg of 50 IOPS per spindle.

(number of IOPS) = (IOPS/mailbox × number of mailboxes) ÷ (IOPS/disk × RAID penalty factor) = (0.5 × 50) ÷ (50× 0.57) = .88 disks for normal users

BES
(3.0 x 50) ÷(50x .57) = 5.26 disks

Total = 6.14 disks

Now if you went with RAID 10 .

Normal Users
(0.5 × 50) ÷ (50× 0.8) = 0.625

BES
(3.0 x 50) ÷(50x .57) = 3.75

Total = 4.375


Also you tranaction logs are 100% at rought 1/10 the data store I/O. So you need less than 1 spindle for transaction logs. While it may require less than one disk it should be sperate. You do not want to mix random I/O(IS Store) with sequential writes.

If you are not planning to grow much I'd go with a 2 disk mirror for the boot volume on SATA, 4 disk RAID 0+1 SAS, Raid 1 SATA for transaction logs. Now your running BES on the same box which also requires MS SQL. Split the DB and tranaction logs just like exchange.


Now if you wnet E2007 the Disk I/O requiremnts are much lower becaus eit can use more than 3GB of RAM. I would still do a RAID 10 but you can probably get away with SATA on E2007.
 
Assuming SAS on RAID5, would what I've got work?

I seriously don't think I need a huge RAID10. I'm running 30 BES users and 60-65 regular users right now just fine on SBS. Add to that file sharing, domain responsibilities, imaging, etc. Runs just fine, the problem is not only the current 75 user max limit, but obviously Exchange and BES are the two biggest resource hogs, and breaking them off to their own server should help tremendously.
 
TechieSooner said:
Assuming SAS on RAID5, would what I've got work?

I seriously don't think I need a huge RAID10. I'm running 30 BES users and 60-65 regular users right now just fine on SBS. Add to that file sharing, domain responsibilities, imaging, etc. Runs just fine, the problem is not only the current 75 user max limit, but obviously Exchange and BES are the two biggest resource hogs, and breaking them off to their own server should help tremendously.
Click to expand...

Is 1 extra SAS drive going to break the bank ? You would get a much better bang for your buck on RAID 10. A 3-disk raid 5 would have the same usable storage as a 4 disk raid 0+1.

I would look at your avg disk latency on the existing server. Are you near 20 ms ?

Do a perfmon for 48 hours on your busiest days. Look at the top two hour period. What doe sthe avg disk sec/read and avg disk/write look like ?

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/10/11/240868.aspx

It would be worth an extra couple hundred $$ now not to have to reconfigure the server 6 months to a year from now due to some growth. BES users really put a beating on the exchange server. If you even think you might be adding more BES users i would invest in the disk now. SATA provides much more space at a lower cost but for Exchange its all about the # of spindles.

There are all kinds of factorts that play into the disk I/O requirements. Like I said getting more memory and doing Exchange 2007 will reduce the disk I/O dratically.

Also having your users who are <1GB on their mailbox in cached mode will reduce disk I/O as well. Keeping their critical path folder item counts below 2500 items will also have a huge impact.

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2005/03/14/395229.aspx
 
oakfan52 said:
A 3-disk raid 5 would have the same usable storage as a 4 disk raid 0+1.
Click to expand...
?? I get more usable storage with a RAID 5????
Seems like the way to go to me.
oakfan52 said:
I would look at your avg disk latency on the existing server. Are you near 20 ms ?
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I'll have to run perfmon to see what my current is. Have not done that in a few months. Monday is busiest day, I'll just do it tomorrow.
oakfan52 said:
Like I said getting more memory and doing Exchange 2007 will reduce the disk I/O dratically.
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4GB sufficient? I guess I can always upgrade later but I'd like to have this one last to 100 users.

oakfan52 said:
Also having your users who are <1GB on their mailbox in cached mode will reduce disk I/O as well. Keeping their critical path folder item counts below 2500 items will also have a huge impact.
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I really cannot manage how many items they have, but their max is all 1GB, and they do all run in cached mode.
 
looks like it can interesting. hope they make a guide to install on SBS 08.

but swtich to SAS, not much cheaper, if you need a reseller go through me =)
 
TechieSooner said:
?? I get more usable storage with a RAID 5????
Seems like the way to go to me.
Click to expand...

Raid 10 offers faster I/O to the disks because you don't have the parity overhead. At a cost of disk space, your price per GB basicly doubles. But raid 10 is the way to go if you don't mind loosing the extra space.

4GB sufficient? I guess I can always upgrade later but I'd like to have this one last to 100 users.
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I run exhcange 2007 on 4 GB ram, i'm a smaller company though. My store.exe got hung up and bogged up the RAM the other day, other than that, howmany users are you going to have


On a side note, I would simply rebuild the server into a server 2003 R2 64-bit server, don't mess with the transition back, you end up paying more for the OS, and SBS is the only server that cares about CAL's

Go with a clean install of exchange 07 on the new box, and transfer the mailbox's

I am guessing you have a SBS domain right now, let me know if you need help installing exchange 07 on the sbs domain.
 
o yeah only 4gb?

point of 64bit is to go above that, its cheap to go to 8gb or even 12 or even 16gb from dell.
 
Dan_D said:
You will want more for Microsoft Exchange anyway.
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Exchange 2003 can only use 2GB(3GB with /3GB).

Exchange 2007 reccomeneds 2GB + 3-5MB per mailbox so technically 4Gb would be fine. Just make sure you have open slots for exspansion later.
 
marley1 said:
can BES be run on 64bit?

I would look into that =)
Click to expand...
No info online, will need to call RIM maybe.

oakfan52 said:
I would look at your avg disk latency on the existing server. Are you near 20 ms ?
Click to expand...

Is this bad? This is so far today.
3039196902_b0fb429fca_o.jpg
 
oakfan52 said:
Exchange 2003 can only use 2GB(3GB with /3GB).

Exchange 2007 reccomeneds 2GB + 3-5MB per mailbox so technically 4Gb would be fine. Just make sure you have open slots for exspansion later.
Click to expand...

That's right. I forgot about the limitations with Exchange 2003. On the 2007 side, I'd say go for at least 4GB of RAM if not more. This gives the machine room to grow as you said.
 
Wouldn't three RAID1 volumes work in his environment? System, Logs, Database?
 
fluke420 said:
Wouldn't three RAID1 volumes work in his environment? System, Logs, Database?
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Yes RAID 1 would work here. There is really no applicaton where it isn't a good idea. However RAID 1 works so long as you have an equal number of drives for redundancy as you have for actual usage. RAID 5 provides reasonable redundancy as well. In the end RAID 5 is often cheaper while offering more usable space with reasonable redundancy. Thus it is often the preferred solution.
 
Dan_D said:
Yes RAID 1 would work here. There is really no applicaton where it isn't a good idea. However RAID 1 works so long as you have an equal number of drives for redundancy as you have for actual usage. RAID 5 provides reasonable redundancy as well. In the end RAID 5 is often cheaper while offering more usable space with reasonable redundancy. Thus it is often the preferred solution.
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Yup, that's why I'd like to stick with RAID5.

4GB to 8GB of RAM on this was only $100, I'll defantely do that.
The SAS drives are ridiculous though, probably added $400/drive to the cost (5 total physical drives).
 
TechieSooner said:
Yup, that's why I'd like to stick with RAID5.

4GB to 8GB of RAM on this was only $100, I'll defantely do that.
The SAS drives are ridiculous though, probably added $400/drive to the cost (5 total physical drives).
Click to expand...

Well the cost is exactly why many people choose inferior drives for the task. Any server that will handle file serving duties or handle multiple disk requests at any given time needs to use SAS drives instead of SATA drives. That's the one area where SAS/SCSI really excell over their more common brethren.
 
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