We use Blade servers in our Presentation Server 4.5 environment (approximatley 100 server split between 8 application silos). The hardware ranges from Dell PowerEdge 1955s to newer Dell M610s. We've been toying with ways to increase performance of the servers and recognize that disk performance on our Blades is usually the bottleneck. In our standard configuration, the two drives (1955s = 73GB/10k, M610s = 146GB/15K) are mirrored. We've configured a couple of servers with no RAID (two independant disks) and tried balancing resources across the two (page file, temp directories, spooler directory, etc). While this did yield some positive results, it wasn't that noticeable in the grand scheme of things.
I just read the following article from Citrix, apparently published on 7/21/2010. The issues referred to are currently what plague our environment the most. One of the recommendations is to try a RAID 0 configuration in Blade systems with only two drives. We've historically written this off as a solution because of the recommendation of not striping a page file. Do you think the potential fragmentation issues would be considered an acceptable risk when compared to the potential disk performance improvements? We do have Diskkeeper installed on all of our servers which is scheduled to run during the evening hours. I do believe it addresses page file fragmentation but it has been awhile since I've looked into the capabilities of the product. I should note that our M610s with 256MB cache (caching enabled) and RAID1 do seem to perform much better than our older servers. http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX125882 - Sean ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
