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virtualization - 1 or 2 physical servers?

R

ryan010101

Junior Member
My company is looking to get new server hardware, initial goal being to replace a circa 2002 Windows server (domain controller, SQL Server) and a over used 3-4 year old linux server (LAMP plus accounting software) via virtualized servers (probably XenServer).

My question... the budget for the server hardware is ~$6k, would it be better to buy one server or two? I know with two servers the benefit is load balancing and fail over. Basically looking for best performance bang for the buck, fail over is nice but not a high priority (some downtime is acceptable).

External storage will mainly be a NAS for backing up the virtual machines. We do not have the $ for SAN etc. Can the benefits of 2 servers and load balancing happen without fast external storage?

Any opinions/insight appreciated.

thanks
Ryan
 
IMHO, I would recommend two... working in a company that uses them, we've seen our share of random hardware failures. I am assuming some downtime != RMA'ing hardware and getting a replacement within a week-ish or so?

By good performance what are you running? Do you need lots of computational power , are your apps CPU hungry?

Yes you can have 2 servers and load balancing without external storage and still maintain good performance.
 
If you're looking purely fir performance, then the best bang for buck would be a single $6000 server. However I think the higher availability of a two-server solution easily trumps the performance issue.
 
He did say he had a NAS. It all depends on how much traffic he's serving. But with a one or two hosts I cannot imagine he's getting much in the way of hits to this(or these) host(s).

If I was in the same position I would order two, and virt them out into several children instances to quadrule..etc the processing ability I had. Plus that with the availability issue would seal the deal for me.

Downtime is never fun, and certainly can get you at the worse times. There's nothing worse than, as a business, saying " I can't get to this right now, its down, sorry!"

People get tired of that.

/rant

With a single server you can get some beefy machine, but with two you could get a couple slightly less beefy machines that would still be able to pump out good performance.

That's my 2 cents worth... and my several years of working with virtuals...
 
dpro1979 said:
He did say he had a NAS. It all depends on how much traffic he's serving. But with a one or two hosts I cannot imagine he's getting much in the way of hits to this(or these) host(s).

If I was in the same position I would order two, and virt them out into several children instances to quadrule..etc the processing ability I had. Plus that with the availability issue would seal the deal for me.

Downtime is never fun, and certainly can get you at the worse times. There's nothing worse than, as a business, saying " I can't get to this right now, its down, sorry!"

People get tired of that.

/rant

With a single server you can get some beefy machine, but with two you could get a couple slightly less beefy machines that would still be able to pump out good performance.

That's my 2 cents worth... and my several years of working with virtuals...
Click to expand...

I'm agreeing with you. 🙂 My post was in response to yinan.
 
I'd do 2 servers, just for the redundancy aspect... worst case you can probably run the whole network on one of them while the other is being repaired.
 
Haha sorry mfenn, I kinda answered the question and continued my rant 🙂 and caught you up with it.

I am used to people not listening to what I say about virtuals, bad habit of working where I do.
 
Ok so 2 servers over 1.

I need to do more reading in this area but maybe it can be summed up for me... are the servers essentially mirrored? I'm not quite clear what is actually going on with the load balancing. I really feel like i am more concerned with the performance aspect over the redundancy/fail over. Being down for a day or two cause of major hardware failure is actually acceptable. I'd rather take advantage of the performance gains the 99.99% the hardware is in use rather than being prepared for the .01% of the time something goes majorly wrong.

That said if 2 lesser servers = 1 better server in performance, then I'm all for it. I was looking at Dell R710, 2 X5550 processors, 24GB RAM, this would be a single server option of course.

Any min specs you could recommend for two servers?

Thanks for all the input.
-Ryan
 
I run 12 VM's on 2 Dell R610's. However both of mine hang off of an MD3000i. You can run NFS to host datastores on the NAS (I assume it exports NFS?) I spent the $900 and went VMware though.

Make sure to have separate network for the NAS > Host servers.
 
There might be some advantages to using a separate SQL Server. It depands how many queries you run and how you produce your reports. A lot depends on your usage patterns and the total bandwidth you have. If you have lagging hardware, then you really need to know what is slowing it down before you try to fix it.

We use a lot of 3rd party servers and software that access our database that need to interface through a SQL server, so ours is in a separate box.
 
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SQL Server is not much of an issue here actually. It's used by one application which is not users hitting it, usage is pretty light. The linux server which over time has gotten to be used by more and more things is really where the performance issues are.

Our current switches are not gigabit, getting one for this set up is a must correct?

thanks
 
Dell has next day warranty part replacements, if you determine part problems, so IMO, a single server would be OK, if you can handle hours of downtime, if not 24 hours. Otherwise get two servers.

I would run VM's on them, if you read through licensing, ESXi (free) might work for your company, since you're not reselling the VPS's.
 
If you don't have a whole lot of employees (more than 25), I'd say get a higher end server to handle the processing loads and a lower end server for the rest. That or you could just spend a good chunk of that $6k into the server and the rest on warranty contracts with the manufacturer of your choice (Dell, HP, IBM, etc).
 
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