April 9, 2007 at 11:31 am
Our company has more servers than I have teeth! Part of our consolidation will require a SAN (which we don't yet have) but the other part is, simply, consolidating servers (sql and others). The VP of IS is talking about using "super servers" (a super-"sized" server? Sounds like Carl's Junior to me.) To start my education in that area, can you recommend any servers that support 4, 8, or 32 CPUs and correspondingly large amounts of RAM?
TIA,
Bill
April 9, 2007 at 11:57 am
Check out HP Super dome = 32 processors (each 64 bit) up to 128 GB RAM.
They also have mini domes = half the config above (aproxly).
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Dinakar Nethi
Life is short. Enjoy it.
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April 9, 2007 at 11:30 pm
Oh geez, here comes trouble. Do not walk, run(!) to engage a virtualization/consolidation partner. There are so many landmines along the path of consolidation/virtualization that I can't even begin to address them all here, but please, please, please get someone to help you before you even begin to think about spending money on this effort - find a good partner to help (1) identify exactly what you will be consolidating/virtualizing, (2) the expected cost/benefit of doing so and (3) identify those servers/circumstances where consolidation/virtualization is a BAD idea.
Engage your hardware/software vendors as soon as you can - ask them to help you formulate a plan (most will bend over backwards to earn/continue to earn your business), perform an audit, etc. Be sure to engage more than one vendor and get competing bids/recommendations from each and then once you've got as much information as possible make your decision and set a direction.
VMWare? Superdome? White Box? There is just no way that anyone who isn't intimately familiar with your existing environment & future needs/plans can recommend a particular strategy. It may turn out that you need 3 NAS heads with 4TB of space each and 94U of single processor white box servers all tied together with 10G Ethernet running Windows 2003 R2 on top of VMWare ESX with a Veritas backup system with X number of licenses... or you could pick a 32 processor Superdome ($1 Million + last time I checked) without knowing what the heck you're doing and end up with a single HBA, I/O bound 32 processor wait state that actually performs better when you turn off all of the CPU's but one.
Sounds to me like you've got the perfect opportunity to engage a partner before any mistakes are made (e.g. no SAN or NAS and a desire to consolidate).
Joe
April 10, 2007 at 2:57 am
I completely agree with Joe's advice. If you do not have good in-house skills in choosing SANs, big servers, etc, then you WILL waste lots of time and money trying to do this job yourself. Even if you think you have the skills, if this is the first big SAN project then get a business partner who has done this before, so you can check the sanity of your decisions, and provide an unbiased opinion to the rest of your business you are doing things right.
We have had a good experience with HDS SANs and HP servers, but there are some other choices just as good out there, as well as many that are simply not up to the job. Get an experienced business partner, document your requirements (tip: start with DR and work backwards to GB capacity) and SLAs.
Original author: https://github.com/SQL-FineBuild/Common/wiki/ 1-click install and best practice configuration of SQL Server 2019, 2017 2016, 2014, 2012, 2008 R2, 2008 and 2005.
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April 10, 2007 at 5:44 am
If you are old enough then having more servers then teeth could mean that you have 2 or 3 servers which is not too much.
If by chance you have more (teeth and servers) the before engaging some super servers you can plan your consolidation smoothly. Check the performance and ressource usage of each servers (mem, proc, HDD...) so you can see whether you can remove some of your actual servers my simply migrating the data/applications/databases to an another one.
I have also SQLServers where we are hosting around 100 databases and also dedicated DB server for SAP having 1,2+ TB size.
Without knowing your environment I'm pretty sure you could reduce the number of servers by at least 30% without buying and additional iron. (maybe some more RAM or HDD)
Bye
Gabor
April 10, 2007 at 4:55 pm
Thanks to everyone for the insight.
Looks like it's time to find a "consolidation" partner who has been through the "loop" before.
Bill
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