building a windows 2008R2 terminalserver, which 10 x SSD to get?

[jasonjm]

will handle load of up to 100+ users simultaneously

specs of server so far are

Dell T710
96GB ram
Intel® Xeon® X5690 3.46GHz 6 Core CPU x 2
Perc 6i controller
2 x SATA 2.5 inch hard disks in raid 0 for paging file

this will be the first terminalserver I build where I am going to try SSD for OS, programs and user profiles.

Looking for obviously best blend of reliability / performance / price

10 x SSD in raid 10

Was thinking of going with OCZ Technology 50 GB Vertex 2 ? 10 of em? good price at $100 a piece

and obviously Raid 10 would give it some redundancy against drive deaths, but I would still rather not start having all sorts of drive issues.....

any ideas / comments?

 

[LokutusofBorg]

Seems to me you're thinking of making a jump to SSD here without really knowing why. You don't tell us anything about the IO profile of the tasks the users will be performing on this machine. And you say you're putting the OS page file on a 2 disk SATA array... the IO profile of the Windows page file is one of the most perfectly suited usages for SSD storage.

I think you're crazy to think of putting Vertex 2 drives in a production server 100+ users will be dependent on. You need enterprise drives: Intel X25-E or equivalent, or go with Fusion-IO or OCZ Z-Drives. Or if you really want to go ghetto, then X25-Ms as a baseline. But really, unless the users are doing something insane on this server, then 10x 10k or 15k SAS drives will be more than good enough.

Also, any RAID setup (other than 0, which is anathema for a prod server, btw) gives you "redudancy against drive deaths". The RAID config you choose should be dependent on load and IO profile characteristics for the workload you know this server will need to handle.

 

[Emulex]

you need to use enterprise drives dude. that would be Intel X25-E right now.

or wait for eMLC. but honestly if you get a better raid controller you could do 6-8 600GB drives (cheetah/savvio) and be fine.

Disk space is limited. your ram choice of 8gb x 12 is optimized - bravo - most people don't see that - the price premium for the x5690 over a slightly slower model isn't worth it.

OCZ is junk - do not let it near a server. Maybe a dell- nah not even a dell. lol.

 

[yinan]

This will be a really slow experience if 100+ people are hitting a server with only 100Gb of RAM simultaneously. I would go with at least 256GB or 512.

 

[mtngoat]

JasonJM: Good project! Am thinking of trying SSD on a 2008 Standard (32-bit ver.) server. I think that quality SSD for Terminal Server drive space is an excellent, if slightly expensive, concept.

There is not much useful info on forums, etc., about this topic. SSD sure appears to work well for gamers!

Please keep posting as you proceed. Lots of folks are interested!

 

[KentState]

This will be a really slow experience if 100+ people are hitting a server with only 100Gb of RAM simultaneously. I would go with at least 256GB or 512.

How do you figure? I just looked at one of our terminal servers and only 7GB of ram is used with 28 sessions. During load testing of one of our applications, we had 80 people logged in and it didn't even get close to 24GB.

 

[Jeff7181]

How do you figure? I just looked at one of our terminal servers and only 7GB of ram is used with 28 sessions. During load testing of one of our applications, we had 80 people logged in and it didn't even get close to 24GB.

He was probably thinking in terms of VM's. Multiple RDP sessions to the same server share a lot of resources compared to having 1 VM per user.

That said, I think you're going to be disappointed with the reliability of SSD drives. They're going to see A LOT of action with 100+ users. I think you'd be better off with 10 15k enterprise quality drives and forget about where to put the paging file. Get enough RAM that nobody's apps will ever be swapped out of RAM - 96 is in the neighborhood but I think 128 or more would be better. Never underestimate the amount of RAM you're going to need because it'll be quite costly to replace that 96 GB of RAM with whatever turns out to be the correct amount.

Of course, you did leave out a HUGE piece of info that anyone would need to comment intelligently on your plan. What are these 100+ users going to be doing on this server? Is it a desktop replacement running Outlook and Youtube? Is it a workstation replacement doing photo and video editing? Is it a jump server used basically to initiate another RDP session into a box on another network?

 

[taltamir]

Seems to me you're thinking of making a jump to SSD here without really knowing why. You don't tell us anything about the IO profile of the tasks the users will be performing on this machine. And you say you're putting the OS page file on a 2 disk SATA array... the IO profile of the Windows page file is one of the most perfectly suited usages for SSD storage.

I think you're crazy to think of putting Vertex 2 drives in a production server 100+ users will be dependent on. You need enterprise drives: Intel X25-E or equivalent, or go with Fusion-IO or OCZ Z-Drives. Or if you really want to go ghetto, then X25-Ms as a baseline. But really, unless the users are doing something insane on this server, then 10x 10k or 15k SAS drives will be more than good enough.

Also, any RAID setup (other than 0, which is anathema for a prod server, btw) gives you "redudancy against drive deaths". The RAID config you choose should be dependent on load and IO profile characteristics for the workload you know this server will need to handle.

all good points.

@OP: what KIND of server? Database transactions? FTP server? email server? http server? We can hardly recommend anything without knowing...
Although we can still caution against using the vertex 2, tell you to use an SSD for pagefile, caution against RAID0, etc... just like LokutusofBorg just did actually. His advice is spot on, although he and others can be more specific if you provide more specifics.

 

[Emulex]

dude wait - intel is delayed but AT confirmed pretty much what i was saying the X25-E G2 will be mlc with some SLC for the reserve area. up to 800gb. they are just delayed. this will give you the write and size capacity and extre duration along with 25nm pricing

 

[taltamir]

dude wait - intel is delayed but AT confirmed pretty much what i was saying the X25-E G2 will be mlc with some SLC for the reserve area.

nowhere does AT say that the intel G3 will have SLC reserves and MLC main... its 100% MLC.