Dell PE1950 - Good as Active Directory Domain Controllers?

[ame540]

Hi,

We have a small office of about 30 users, and are going to be migrating to Microsoft Active Directory. We will be creating a single AD domain. I am curious as to how much hardware we need to invest in to reduce our risk of complete failure and not having anyone be able to log onto the domain.

I was considering two PE1950's, each with 2 processors and 4 GB of RAM. Redundant power supplies, and mirrored hard drives (RAID1).

How much hard drive space is going to be enough to support our users for a long time? We will not be storing user data on these servers, the hard drive space will only be for Active Directory functionality.

Is 4GB of RAM enough?

What are the minimum processor specs I should consider?

Just looking for some advice on if anyone else is using lower-end 1U Servers as domain controllers. Thank you!

 

[baddos]

Thats overkill for your size network if they are just domain controllers.

 

[ame540]

Will a single Quadcore processor be enough? RAM is so cheap these days, id just get the 4GB...

 

[technome]

If the server is used just for the AD functions, DNS, DHCP, Wins if needed, a dual core is overkill, 4 Gig ram is more then needed. For 30 users, Active directory's load would be difficult to measure; if all the users logged in at exactly 9 am, you might be able to see a performance hit caused by AD. For a few hundred users I would be concerned, not 30. Hard disk size, with no user data, just profiles, 75 Gig would be plenty.
As a minimum... I have one low resource client running an AD server(FSMO) on Pentium 2.8, 2 Gig ram, runs DNS, DHCP, AV, Veritas BE, SQL/Dynamics Great Plains, used for file sharing, 25 users, no issues.



........................................
Chernobyl disaster..a must see pictorial

http://www.kiddofspeed.com/default.htm

 

[ame540]

That is exactly what i'm wanting to hear. Perhaps the title of this thread should have been "What are your AD Domain Controller specs?"

thanks for the feedback.

so a dual core processor should be sufficient.

 

[baddos]

Yeah dual core is fine. Look around though, sometimes you can get a quad core cheaper, because it's a lower clock speed per core.

 

[ame540]

we get some pretty good deals through our sales rep at Dell, so if its just a single processor, I'll most likely be getting a quad core.

 

[technome]

If your old data servers are not super ancient, I would be tempted to use those as DCs, and use the new quad cores as the data servers...a quad core is a terrible thing to waste.


........................................
Chernobyl disaster..a must see pictorial

http://www.kiddofspeed.com/default.htm

 

[ame540]

Not a bad idea at all technome. Since the bosses have OK'd new hardware, I have no problems getting us something nice. Our data server situation has really leveled out recently and is going to be OK the existing machines for a while!

 

[technome]

Since the bosses have OK'd new hardware, I have no problems getting us something nice."
I am a Consultant, lately a few clients have upgraded, so I have a few Dell 2900 III 3.0 quad cores to play with, along with Win 2008 32 and 64 bit. New toys are important, otherwise the boredom sets in.
Good luck

........................................
Chernobyl disaster..a must see pictorial

http://www.kiddofspeed.com/default.htm