Server Recommendation

[colotom]

Hi,

We've got a couple of aging PE2600s and want to replace them.

We are not in a position to go 100% cloud because of bandwidth limitations, and we have Quickbooks Enterprise that will have to reside in-house. Have about 25 users, with some growth in the next year (5-10 addl).

Current config is a PE2600 with SBS2003 DC / file server. Second server is PE2600 with Terminal Services - also serving Quickbooks enterprise.

Trying to minimize cost, but I don't think I can get down to one server for everything - mainly because of the need for Terminal Services / Remote Desktop.

Would appreciate any insight on what options you see.

Thanks!

 

[Noway2]

I admittedly don't have a lot of experience in this realm, but from reading what you have posted, I do have a couple of recommendations.

One, use the performance monitor tools in your current installation to get an idea of the percentage utilization of your existing system. Of particular interest would be the depth of the IO queues for disk access as disk IO tends to be a bottleneck. Of course you will also want to look at percent CPU utilization, network utilization, etc. Once you have some quantitative numbers you will be in a much better position to determine what level of hardware you require so that you are not spending money needlessly.

Second, since you are using Quickbooks, you are at least partially constrained to keeping Windows, which gets expensive especially when you have a terminal services license per user. If your system is split up, you may be able to use a Linux distribution for one or more of the servers, such as your file server. This approach could save you some significant software costs, especially when you consider upgrades. Properly implemented, the fact that it isn't Windows would be invisible to the users. This would mean that whomever supports your system would need to be fluent in both systems and may be an extra cost.