StarWind Software

Are there any sizing guidelines for CPU & memory in the host? The sizing guide only talks about disks:

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-sizing-guide

After a chat with sales, I suspect that almost any current Dell PowerEdge with dual multi-core (six core is our plan) CPUs would have plenty of CPU power as the bottlenecks are elsewhere.

But what about memory for caching? Current size of primary systems are a 1TB file server, 150GB Exchange 2007 mailbox serving ~100 users.

16GB is about the least we'd put in a server these days but could go to 32GB but don't want to spend money if it's really not going to add performance benefits.

Cheers, Rob.

robnicholson wrote:Are there any sizing guidelines for CPU & memory in the host? The sizing guide only talks about disks:

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-sizing-guide

After a chat with sales, I suspect that almost any current Dell PowerEdge with dual multi-core (six core is our plan) CPUs would have plenty of CPU power as the bottlenecks are elsewhere.

But what about memory for caching? Current size of primary systems are a 1TB file server, 150GB Exchange 2007 mailbox serving ~100 users.

16GB is about the least we'd put in a server these days but could go to 32GB but don't want to spend money if it's really not going to add performance benefits.

Cheers, Rob.

Hi Rob
1-2GB of cache (in write-back mode) per target will be quite enough and will significantly improve performance.
Regarding other requirement, today you will receive an email with needed information.

Thanks for this. We'll have three primary targets (couple of other rarely used/very low bandwidth) so sounds like 16GB will be fine.

Regards, Rob.

robnicholson wrote:Thanks for this. We'll have three primary targets (couple of other rarely used/very low bandwidth) so sounds like 16GB will be fine.

Regards, Rob.

Yes, it will be more than you need. For the primary targets you can allocate 2GB/target, for other targets 512MB will be enough.

Another slightly related question. On a physical server, we'd normally have one big RAID array which we'd then partition are a relatively small C: drive (e.g. 50GB) for the operating system and a much larger E: drive for the data drive (e don't tend to create two RAID arrays for C: and E:)

Would you recommend creating one target on StarWind and partitioning in Windows as above or creating two targets?

Regards, Rob.

robnicholson wrote:Another slightly related question. On a physical server, we'd normally have one big RAID array which we'd then partition are a relatively small C: drive (e.g. 50GB) for the operating system and a much larger E: drive for the data drive (e don't tend to create two RAID arrays for C: and E:)

Would you recommend creating one target on StarWind and partitioning in Windows as above or creating two targets?

Regards, Rob.

Sure it will be better to create 1 target for C and a second one for E.