December 26, 2005 at 8:25 am
The company I just started working for has an old single P4 (desktop class) box running SQL Server 2000. It is the backend for our e-commerce website and pushes large batches of transaction information to another SQL Server that is the backend of our warehouse management system (Pronto). When these batches run, the cpu is pegged at 100% and everything comes to a crawl. We normally run these batches at night, but sometimes something breaks and the batch has to be rerun during normal business hours. This can run for hours.
So my question is how to go about effectively sizing a new server. My bosses are not keen on spending tons of money on hardware and expect to have good reasons presented before them when any requests are being made to spend considerable sums of money. I am a fan of Dell servers and have had good luck with them in the past. The question is how much cpu and RAM do I really need now and in the future. Disk array configuration is not an issue.
December 26, 2005 at 9:18 am
If you are sticking with SQL2K Std, then RAM isn't an issue. You can only use 2GB, so I'd go with 3 or 4GB for the server to give the OS plenty for paging, etc. You didn't mention how much RAM is there now. If you have enterprise, you can run more but then you're talking $$ to get into the PAE/AWE battle. And then you might better just looking at SS2K5/W2K3 and being able to natively run 8GB or more.
For the CPU, all the latest CPUs are a huge improvement and miles beyond the P4 with little difference in price.
It will be hard to extrapolate performance from your existing setup for disk, but that is important. You might want to get a few RAID arrays if they'll let you. Having a RAID 1 for the OS/Paging and a separate RAID 1 or 5 for the data. You might try for a 3rd for logs or for tempdb depending on usage. You might want to track transactions in your db and tempdb to see how balanced they are. If there are lots of transactions skewed towards one db, you might want to separate them.
Even a basic server these days, $2-3k isn't much money for a critical system, like the one running your e-commerce website. Even spending a couple hours on sizing it seems like a waste of time. Buy a basic entry level server that will be miles beyond the P4. You won't get it sized perfectly anyway.
December 27, 2005 at 7:01 am
I agree
December 27, 2005 at 9:32 am
The only point I would add is that at a minimum you need nothing less than dual CPUs <period> Xeon processors are even better.
RegardsRudy KomacsarSenior Database Administrator"Ave Caesar! - Morituri te salutamus."
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