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Windows 2003 AD Hardware Recommendations

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by juliansouthern

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Hi - were looking at upgrading from NT4.0 to Win2K3 (at last!). We have a distributed network over 15 sites with around a thousand users, 800 clients and 80 servers (exchange, sql, logon, file print and citrix.

To prepare for the migration i'm wanting to replace each logon server with a HP DL???. I was thinking a DL360 with 2 76Gb SCSI drives.

Is there a recommeded configuration for a server to run AD? Mirrore pair, RAID5, one or two partitions?

Ive looked in quite a few places but cant find any resources. i did come across the adsizer for Win2K but i'd like some on the field comments.

Any information would be appreciated

Julian

4 replies

by cg it

Large drive space for the O/S to reside on on a DC isn't as important as horsepower and bandwidth. The O/S and SPs, Hotfixes, patches don't really take up all that much room 20GB and that leaves about 8 to 10 GB for virtual memory and swap file. Mirrored provides fault tolerance which is good in that the O/S can use data on either drive to work. Also, the role[s] that the server plays should determine whether you can get away with a IDE drive or need a fast SCSI, need multiprocessor or just one. A DC that has the AD roles GC, RID, IM and PDC roles as well as the schema master and domain naming master roles plus is the DNS server and DHCP server, it should have some umph to it. These roles don't take up disk space, but do take up system resources.

by ppigeon

Are you still looking for a solution? If so, email me at ppigeon@netpro.com

Regards,

Perry

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