Dom
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Sticking together a SBS 2008 HP Microserver box for the office (only 3 users), was planning to use the included 250GB for the OS and then creating a raid 1 array on a pair of 1TB drives for file storage and backups (would 'Green' drives be ok or is worth spending the extra few quid on 7200rpm drives?) - anyone see a problem with this setup? Would it be worth moving the mailboxes to the raid array as well?
Tar 
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VrsTurbo
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Unless you have a good backup i would go 4 discs raid 5. I wonldnt put your OS on a single disc as you are asking for problems.
Make sure you follow all the steps else you will have problems.
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John
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SBS is pretty resource hungry as well, running it one disk will be slow.
If a pair of 1TB drives is all the raid you have I'd put everything on them.
What you using for the RAID? IS it software or does it have a decent controller?
Depends how vital it is the company have access to files and email though, which if it was they would probably have better hardware.
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Dom
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quote:
Originally posted by VrsTurbo
Unless you have a good backup i would go 4 discs raid 5. I wonldnt put your OS on a single disc as you are asking for problems.
Make sure you follow all the steps else you will have problems.
For 3 users raid 5 would be overkill especially considering the N36L doesn't support it. And if i was planning to spend the extra few hundred (budget is near enough nil as is) on a 4 disk array i'd probably be better going raid 10 for the 'write' performance increase.
On top of that if anything corrupted it'd get duplicated across all drives so i'd need a backup solution in place on top of that.
If the OS is imaged after install/setup and the OS drive (probably keep mailboxes on that drive for time being considering all 3 mailboxes total ~1.5GB and there isn't much throughput/traffic) regularly backed up to the mirrored array (+ i'll try and sort an external); surely that would be perfectly fine for a 3 user setup?
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Dom
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quote:
Originally posted by John
SBS is pretty resource hungry as well, running it one disk will be slow.
If a pair of 1TB drives is all the raid you have I'd put everything on them.
What you using for the RAID? IS it software or does it have a decent controller?
Depends how vital it is the company have access to files and email though, which if it was they would probably have better hardware.
I've been reading into SBS 2008 on the N36L and apart from it being a bit of a dog for bootup/shutdown times it apparently runs perfectly fine once loaded (even read a blog post of a guy running it as part of an ESXi setup and said it happily handled a handful of mailboxes whilst other VMs were running).
Raid would be onboard, I have naff all for a hardware controller and its one reason why I’m reluctant on having the OS on the raid array especially as performance is likely to be slower than a single drive.
Obviously I want to minimise downtime but it isn't the end of the world, especially as emails redirect to a POP box if there is no response from the exchange server.
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John
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For 3 users with no always on priority it should be fine.
Although 'we don't mind if it goes down' soon turns to 'get this fixed yesterday' when it actually happens.
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Dom
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That's the only thing i worried about, but saying that the MD didn't froth at the mouth when we had 2 days where emails were getting bounced back and he kind of knows (i'll remind him again before the gear gets purchased) the situation.
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John
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Google apps or office 365 not an option?
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Dom
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quote:
Originally posted by John
Google apps or office 365 not an option?
First thing i mentioned when moving to the new office, as the current server could be replaced with a decent NAS box and would save a lot of hassle in the long run (office is on a metered line as well). But he wasn't interested, didn't really go into much of a reason why although i suspect it's money related (£90 a year for Google Apps is peanuts tbf) and probably thought it'd be cheaper in the long run 
[Edited on 03-09-2011 by Dom]
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pow
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3 users?
Crack it all on one hard disk and use the built in backup to back up system state and stuff to a remote NAS
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Dom
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quote:
Originally posted by pow
3 users?
Crack it all on one hard disk and use the built in backup to back up system state and stuff to a remote NAS
Unfortunately there isn't the budget for a NAS box (tbf i can see it being difficult getting an external drive added to the shopping list) as well as the server and the metered net connection (currently they get 5GB on a 2Mbit line @ £40p/m, gets stupidly expensive very quickly after this) would make offsite storage a problem.
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pow
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Do what I did then, build an XPP box, join it to the domain and use that as a 'NAS'
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Dom
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quote:
Originally posted by pow
Do what I did then, build an XPP box, join it to the domain and use that as a 'NAS'
XPP? You mean build a linux based (FreeNAS) box? There will be the old whitebox server going but it's all old gear (IDE based) and would be pointless spending any money on it ie: buy drives for it.
It's certainly an idea though.....
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Sam
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Google Apps is free if you don't need more than 10 mailboxes and more than 7GB or whatever it is storage per mailbox (I use this myself and have set it up for loads of my customers, they are all really chuffed with it and being able to use email from anywhere and on any device etc).
Re. backup storage, for cloud backups just do one full backup and then incrementals after that - shouldn't use up much bandwidth if it's done say once a week or whatever?
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pow
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quote:
Originally posted by Dom
quote:
Originally posted by pow
Do what I did then, build an XPP box, join it to the domain and use that as a 'NAS'
XPP? You mean build a linux based (FreeNAS) box? There will be the old whitebox server going but it's all old gear (IDE based) and would be pointless spending any money on it ie: buy drives for it.
It's certainly an idea though.....
Why would I mess about with linux when I have a wealth of old Dell XPP boxes knocking around that aren't good for anythign as they aren't 7 compatible?  
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Dom
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quote:
Originally posted by pow
quote:
Originally posted by Dom
quote:
Originally posted by pow
Do what I did then, build an XPP box, join it to the domain and use that as a 'NAS'
XPP? You mean build a linux based (FreeNAS) box? There will be the old whitebox server going but it's all old gear (IDE based) and would be pointless spending any money on it ie: buy drives for it.
It's certainly an idea though.....
Why would I mess about with linux when I have a wealth of old Dell XPP boxes knocking around that aren't good for anythign as they aren't 7 compatible?
For a simple storage box, XP (i'm assuming XPP means XP Pro) would be complete overkill and a waste of storage compared to using something like FreeNAS/UnRAID which takes about 20mins to setup (either via CLI or the Web Interface) and can be installed onto a USB stick.
Granted though, if you have boxes lying around with XP already installed then i suppose it saves fannying around.
Sam - Will have to look into Google Apps again; thought it was one mailbox only on the free accounts. As for offsite storage - small files isn't a problem, it's the fact that i'd want to backup the exchange store DB where the issue lies.
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John
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If you've got them all in cached mode that's a kind of backup in this situation.
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Bart
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along with volume shadow copies, you should be laughing.
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pow
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I personally use them in 2 places, mainly because I run 'servers' for legacy apps and software on them as well that I don't want clogging up my Server 2008 R2 box. Will look into freeNAS though.
[Edited on 06-09-2011 by pow]
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Dom
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quote:
Originally posted by John
If you've got them all in cached mode that's a kind of backup in this situation.
I was planning to cached mode, as you say it'd offer a last resort (heard it's a bit of an arseache to restore using cached mail?) restore method.
quote:
Originally posted by Bart
along with volume shadow copies, you should be laughing.
What's the best practice for using shadow copies?
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John
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You'd just open outlook when the server is off, export to pst then when new server was back up just import the pst into the new accounts.
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Dom
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quote:
Originally posted by John
You'd just open outlook when the server is off, export to pst then when new server was back up just import the pst into the new accounts.
Sounds fairly straight forward, hopefully i'll never have to resort to restoring mail using cached backups though.
[Edited on 07-09-2011 by Dom]
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