[THIN] Re: Citrix - Harddisk Specification

Thanks to all of you who responded to my query.

We have purchased Windows Server 2003 Enterprise licenses. Servers will have
4 x 72gb disks and 16gb RAM.

Due to the nature of this particular Citrix installation, there will be only
3 servers for the time being. With this in mind, we have decided to go for
Raid 1 for the OS and the paging file.

Toby



2008/12/19 Joe Shonk <joe.shonk@xxxxxxxxx>

> The question is, is the pagefile being used that much?  If so, then why?
> Overall, it still isn't going to make a difference.  With RAID 0 or 1 you
> are going to be accessing two spindle on every read.  Not so if they are
> operating independently.  You are limiting yourself to 1 read for the
> pagefile and 1 read for the OS at any given time.  And again, how many page
> fault are you encountering?  If it's that big of an issue, then it's time
> to
> add more RAM.
>
> Joe
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
> Behalf
> Of Matt Kosht
> Sent: Friday, December 19, 2008 1:28 PM
> To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [THIN] Re: Citrix - Harddisk Specification
>
> On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 2:58 PM, Joe Shonk <joe.shonk@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Ok... So it's fair to say that the Dell RAID Controllers have progressed
> > since the NT 4.0 days?  If you end up losing the RAID set who cares?
>  It's
> a
> > terminal server.  If Fault Tolerance isn't an issue, then I would argue
> that
> > RAID 0 will give you better performance over two independent spindles.
> I would disagree. If your disk arms (both of them are predominantly
> hitting the page file) you have created latency for other non-paging
> disk activities. System may page faster but apps and other binaries
> are waiting for disk time due to waiting on near constant paging
> activity. It' probably hair splitting at this point dedicated spindle
> for paging vs. just RAID0 but this config works well for me.
>
> >
> > It's not the form factor that causing the drives to fail, but the
> excessive
> > heat generated by blades/chassis.  Not to mention vibrations.
> >
> > Performance Hit with SAN?  Yes, this thread has been through this
> argument.
> > With the right system, it's even faster.  15k SAS drives are great,
> except
> > when you factor in the crappy SAS controllers.
> >
> > SSD give great performance on reads, but not much of an advantage on
> writes.
> > It all depends on your workloads.
> >
> > As far as virtualization goes... Sure there is overhead.  But can a
> single
> > 32-bit Terminal server take advantage of a quad-core processor? Or more
> > likely 8-cores in box? At the moment, the hardware has outpaced the
> > operating system.  Even with x64 system, how many users do you really
> want
> > to pack on single OS instance?
>
> Correct. I am actually talking (4) 32 bit TS/XE servers on 1 physical
> blade (using a bare metal hypervisor like Hyper-V) as it will be able
> to actually use all of that horsepower. x64 breaks some of our apps,
> so for now it's out of the picture. If you have the resources why not
> use it?
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