We’re planning a new installation of BigFix using virtual servers. Previously, we were told by someone from technical support that we should use separate virtual servers for the application server and the SQL server. We have some further questions and I’m hoping someone has the answers:
The documentation says the database will be getting a lot of read / write requests and the virtual server administrators are wondering what sort of disk activity they will see (how many operations per second, I guess).
Since the application server and the database server will be separate, our networking group wants to know which server will the clients attach to? Just the database server or both servers? (We’re trying to get an idea of how much network traffic will be going through each link and which will get the most traffic.)
Our installation will be roughly 3000 clients, running primarily Windows and Mac OS X.
we have about 9K clients and have separate physical app and DB servers. our DB server run the disks so hot that the heat triggers thermal sensors alarms in other systems next to it.
having said that, the clients will talk to the app server which will then relay the information into the DB server. The consoles will connect to the DB server to pull the DB (entire DB it seems) to the console for quicker response though that can be adjusted how much is pulled.
You may not get acceptable performance from virtual machines, especially disk I/O. Even on our dev system, we went from virtual to physical for performance reasons. We run physical dedicated hardware with 6Gbps SAS drives on a good controller that has some cache in a RAID 10. For 3k clients, you may not need RAID 10, RAID 1 or 5 may work in your situation.