Planning out a HA System

[tvalentine]

After doing some research and reading these forums I had some very general planning questions.

The environment is as follows:

- 3 Servers are going to be virtualized. An Windows 2003 Small Business Server running Exchange 2003 for around 35 users, A Server 2008 Terminal Server providing access to Wyse terminals for 25 users, and Server 2003 running a SQL 2005 database for an internal software application.

The HA SAN configuration idea:

The 4 servers will be converted to VM's and run on 2 Hyper-V servers in a clustered configuration.

I am considering using one of the Supermicro Twin series servers, which puts 2 server nodes in a single chassis. I plan on using 16gb of ram per node and using single quad core xeon per node. My limitation with this server would be:

- Only Sata no SAS.

- Only 6 total drive bays per node in this chassis so 2 drives for Server 2008 host OS and 4 Sata drives (most likely WD RE4 2TB) with Raid 10. This would be 6 drives per node so 12 total.

- Gigabit NIC's. 10gb would need to be purchased additionaly if it's needed.


My Questions are:

- Will 4 7200 RPM Sata drives in a Raid 10 have enough IO performance for this configuration?

- Will 1GB to the Hyper-V servers and 1 GB between the SAN's be enough? Is there a performance gain from bonding 2 GB Nics to the Hyper-V server and what about between the SANs?

I understand all environments are different but a rule of thumb or comments someone who has experience with a similar SMB environment would be very helpful.

Thanks in advance for your time.

[Constantin (staff)]

1. Should be enough. Simply buy RAID controller with big cache and battery for secure.
2. I would recommend you to use NIC Teaming for redunancy and higher perfomance of network.