Blog ala Vidar

As many of you probably already know, we’re going to upgrade our main database server this weekend. We’re already starting preparations tomorrow, and boy am I looking forward to it! The “old” TVS2 is going to be our new server now. This has been the technology’s main virtual host server. It’s running with 2 x Quad processors of each 2.66GHz, with 16GB RAM. We will run Windows Server 2008, and of course SQL Server 2008! The new disk setup will be as following:

We discussed this disk-setup with Jon Jahren, and he “approved” it. The only thing he commented was that to get absolutely maximum performance, we should think about SSD disks. Because of the price (SSD disks costs more than the double of SAS disks), and the fact that we already had SAS, we didn’t go for SSDs. At first we were thinking of splitting the MDF file into several files, placing them of several arrays, but according to Jon we would get into more trouble administrating it than we would gain on performance, although the SQLCAT-team (Customer Advisory Team) sais this is “best practice” for performance. We trust Jon, since he’s been helping companies that are much bigger than us with the same problems.

We are starting tomorrow preparing the new server. Copying backups etc will take some time, although we’ve got 1Gb network between the servers. The downtime period is set from 21:00 to 09:00 (12 hours) on Saturday, but if everything goes as planned we’ll be finished before I usually go to bed 😉 I won’t say when!

We are also doing some other minor upgrades. Among them is adding more disks to the server which is running PIMS_R3.

I’ve got a little competition for you (we LOVE competitions in tech). First one to answer gets a prize!
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