Wow. A four-proc machine (933 MHZ?) for 150 users and Exchange? Wow.
My personal opinion:
When it comes to architecture, you have to decide between scale up or scale
out. In AD, scale out is often preferred because it does this well out of
the box and because you want a second copy of the IAA system (Identity,
Authentication and Authorization) for some hardware fault resiliency
purposes.
New hardware has come a long way since Windows 2000 (6 + years old). In the
case of that recommendation, you have several things to contend with: Usage
patterns, applications (Exchange mentioned but are there others?) etc. If
Exchange is the biggest consumer then likely you can get away with two
smaller DC's vs. one really big one. If you're not planning a tremendous
amount of updates, then disk is likely not a big deal other than for
resilience of the application. A couple of mirrored drives and you're
likely going to find it's plenty of performance. You almost can't buy
machines <2.5GHZ these days without real effort. Memory? That's different,
but .5GB to 1GB is likely plenty for that environment with some room left
over.
Some wildcards: Exchange usage. It's hard to guage what your impact will be
with Exchange on the DC's. 150 users usually don't put a serious hurting on
a DC but it's possible. If so, then scale up disk and memory and go with
dual proc vs. single proc to increase performance. If Exchange is handling
less than 2 million messages a day, I wouldn't bother with different DC
hardware and I would seriously consider it even if I was because you only
have 150 possible destinations in the first place :)
Bottom line, I would guess that two HP 360's (SCSI; I haven't been made
comfortable with SATA reliability yet) or 140's with 1GB of memory each
would be more than needed based on those parameters. If you virtualize
anything on top of that, some other considerations would be needed of
course. (or Dell or IBM equivalent of course).
My $0.04 (USD) anyway.
From: "Edwin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org
To: <ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org>
Subject: [ActiveDir] Hardware Suggestions
Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2005 07:52:39 -0500
Currently there is an open thread entitled "RAID suggestions for DC; maybe
OT". I didn't want to dirty that thread by introducing my question that
builds upon it.
How about other hardware requirements such as CPU, Disk Size and RAM? RAID
configuration I think is documented very well but how can you scale Active
Directory's growth?
I downloaded ADSizer
(http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/reskit/tools/new/adsizer-o.as
p) but the recommended hardware did not display good results in my opinion.
It was suggested that I have a machine with 4 x 933 Xeon Processors and 512
MB or RAM. It just does not make sense to me to have so much CPU but so
little RAM. ADSizer does recommend Disk recommendations, but my results
returned a System Disk in RAID1 but nothing for Log or Database Disks.
In the environment that I wish to deploy a new domain, I will have around
150 or so member computers and possibly 50 or so others that are stand
alone
workstations. MS Exchange 2003 will also be a part of the domain.
Initially, I do not think that any attributes other than the required
defaults will be used on user objects, but eventually I would like to
populate or add this information in the future.
Are there guidelines on recommended hardware for DC's in a domain? MS
Exchange seems to be well documented on this but I have not found much on
DC's.
Thanks,
Edwin
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