I spec’ing out a new 10,000 license BigFix server and have some questions. For starters…
Do the server specs listed in the “Admin Guide” take a local MSSQL DB into account, or is it expected that the DB will reside on a different server?
Are there recommendations for laying out the application across multiple RAID groups? The server build specs says 1-2 RAID 10 arrays, but that’s kind of nebulous. IE, assuming the DB is on the application server, should the DB content be on one RAID10, and the OS reside on another?
Yes. Most customers use the DB and BigFix Server components on the same system and our specs reflect this configuration. We don’t normally see major performance increases in using a remote database and it complicates many things so we support it, but we think it is easier and chepaer to use a single BigFix Server with DB.
If you come anywhere close to our recommendations with your server specs, then you normally don’t have a problem with memory or CPU for your server. But since the agents are always reporting new info, most of our recommendations will be geared around allowing high insertion rates into the database and thus our configurations of the RAID will be geared towards maintaining high read/write speeds for SQL Server. I think if you have two RAID 10 arrays, you would have the DB on one RAID10 and the application, OS, transaction log on another.
At 10,000 agents, you do want to worry about performance, but the nice thing is that our BigFix Server is expected to max out at about 250,000 agents and so you aren’t pushing any limits in this fairly standard mid/small deployment.