Spent a few days with 2008 server Standard and Enterprise RC1 on a Dell 2900III, quad core, 8 Gig ram, Perc 6I raid adapter, setup as a raid 1 and raid 5 (4 disk), 15k SAS drives; aligned the partitions on both raids at 64. Disk benchmarked both Windows 2003 and 2008 on this server.....
Installation of 2008, including the necessary reboots took 20 minutes. Boot time <50 seconds after the bios screen. Win 2003 took about the same.
There is a BIG difference how both versions of Sever 2008 (and the Perc 6i) handle file caching compared to both Win 2000 and Windows 2003. The older server versions concentrated on large files throughput, generally the incorrect area to strive for, as most servers need to concentrate on small files. In a complete reversal, 2008 aims at small data chunks. The caching in 2008 is phenomenal, file sizes under 30 Meg are cached, disk benchmarking programs run from the cache, the disks rarely show access, unlike it's predecessors. Even IOmeter, with its build in access specifications only runs from cache without modifications.
The raid 1 performs very well, with the "write back" enabled, dismal with it disabled, as expected. The raid 5, "write back" enabled, performed better than the raid 1 in both reads and writes, writes are only slightly ahead, reads more so; I did not bother running raid 5 with "write through", a useless cause with any raid 5 setup.
I RCed to the desktop in admin mode and ran a few programs. Strangely, I kept looking up at the RDP screen tab, as it was hard to believe I was not at the console, no delays at all.
Played with the hyper-v....
As soon as this is installed, even if it is stopped, even if all the associated services are stopped... disk throughput drops approx 25%, due to the parameter changes in the registry. Installation of a VM running 2008 was a no brainer, but this is as far as I wanted to go, as this performance hit is beyond my acceptance, as this server will running among other things a disk intensive SQL based program. The good news, once hyper-v is uninstalled performance is back to pre-hyper-v levels
If I were to order the server now, 12 Gigs of ram would be my minimum. Did some registry tweaks, the usual for server 2003, on one install, which made no measurable difference.
The 32bit or 64 bit version, made no appreciable difference in disk throughput.
........................................
Chernobyl disaster..a must see pictorial
Installation of 2008, including the necessary reboots took 20 minutes. Boot time <50 seconds after the bios screen. Win 2003 took about the same.
There is a BIG difference how both versions of Sever 2008 (and the Perc 6i) handle file caching compared to both Win 2000 and Windows 2003. The older server versions concentrated on large files throughput, generally the incorrect area to strive for, as most servers need to concentrate on small files. In a complete reversal, 2008 aims at small data chunks. The caching in 2008 is phenomenal, file sizes under 30 Meg are cached, disk benchmarking programs run from the cache, the disks rarely show access, unlike it's predecessors. Even IOmeter, with its build in access specifications only runs from cache without modifications.
The raid 1 performs very well, with the "write back" enabled, dismal with it disabled, as expected. The raid 5, "write back" enabled, performed better than the raid 1 in both reads and writes, writes are only slightly ahead, reads more so; I did not bother running raid 5 with "write through", a useless cause with any raid 5 setup.
I RCed to the desktop in admin mode and ran a few programs. Strangely, I kept looking up at the RDP screen tab, as it was hard to believe I was not at the console, no delays at all.
Played with the hyper-v....
As soon as this is installed, even if it is stopped, even if all the associated services are stopped... disk throughput drops approx 25%, due to the parameter changes in the registry. Installation of a VM running 2008 was a no brainer, but this is as far as I wanted to go, as this performance hit is beyond my acceptance, as this server will running among other things a disk intensive SQL based program. The good news, once hyper-v is uninstalled performance is back to pre-hyper-v levels
If I were to order the server now, 12 Gigs of ram would be my minimum. Did some registry tweaks, the usual for server 2003, on one install, which made no measurable difference.
The 32bit or 64 bit version, made no appreciable difference in disk throughput.
........................................
Chernobyl disaster..a must see pictorial
