how to determine ram requirements for a windows 2000 file server

[r0guenj]

i need to find documentation on determining the minimum ram specification for a windows 2000 server being used as a file server.

i saw an article relating to windows server 2003 but i am not sure how applicable this is to the older version.

also i could use a good formula to determine this also.......say ram requirements per 100,000 transactions?

 

[spyordie007]

I dont know of any articles specifically about this, but perhaps if you give us more information about your intended deployment those of us who run 2000 file servers can offer input.

say ram requirements per 100,000 transactions?

100,000 transactions per what period of time? Will these file share(s) be part of a Distributed File System (DFS)? What other services are you looking to have running? How many users do you intend to support with this server and how much traffic do you think they will use?

Typically the RAM requirements for fileservers can be fairly minimal (~1Gb or less) even in medium to medium large organizations. Also keep in mind that unless you've got a lot of small files that are accessed very frequently odds are you'll run out of bandwidth before you run out of RAM.

 

[r0guenj]

thanks for the reply!

we are looking at a distributed file system with ~500 or so users.

i don't know what other services are going to be used but traditionally at my company, the file server only serves files. we don't use it for anything else.

the file sizes are going to range from large to small with varying access times (ie: some files will sit unused for days or weeks until they are needed)

 

[SoulAssassin]

1GB should probably be enough, go for 2 if it's in the budget. Anything above that is a waste.

 

[SoulAssassin]

To follow that up, I manged 44 shared and home drive servers at my company and they run anywhere from 150GB->3TB (total of 29TB). Even on the largest servers we hardly see utilization creep above 500-700MB.

 

[spyordie007]

So you are going to have DFS syncing the shares on this server with other server(s) and will have ~500 users accessing this server?

That be the case you could probably get away with 512; but to play it safe I would go with 1GB. Spec it with room to grow and if you really do run into a RAM issue (or decide you want to host other services on this box) than it's always easy to add in more RAM.

-Erik

 

[r0guenj]

thanks guys....we are going to go with a gig just to be safe and if for some reason we need to add, we have space left to just drop in more ram.