Novell Server reduction

Presuming you're talking about NW4 or NW5 (if not, upgrade first...)
you'll have to clarify which services the machines are doing.
* Printerqueues
* Fileserving for x users
* Or maybe even NLM applications

Generally spoken, as long as the number of users per server remains the same you can scale up enormously by adding more RAM and harddisk. So if e.g. 200 users now use files spread over 3 servers, you can consolidate into one high-end server.
If you want more users on ONE server, then of course it depends on the work done. Printerqueues can soup up quite some capacity (especially Postscript); purely for fileserving I've seen statistics of up to 500-1000 (!) users on one heavy Pentium server, only 1 processor still. With NW6 you could add multiprocessing and consolidate even further.

Hope thiz helpz,

- The Netherlandz

Currently, my environment consists of 2 clustered Netware 6 servers that provide file services for approximately 500 users. The utilization on each server averages around 5% over a one month time frame. Each server has 2 mounted volumes so that both servers are being utilized. Server specs are as follows:

- 2 CPUs per box (900Mhz Xeon)
- 2084 MB of RAM
- 360 GB SAN storage

I also have a stand alone Netware 6 box that services about 1500 users. This server is going off lease in the near future and I will be consolidating the users from this server to the clustered servers. I am also considering adding the 300 NDPS printers to the clustered servers as well since the CPU utilization is so low. In the even that the cluster becomes taxed, I will either add more CPU and Memory or add another small server for printing.

Hopefully you can get a good idea from the above information on how to best configure your environment. If you are looking for a user to server ratio, 1000users per server is probably a pretty good estimate.

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