Dedicated servers for apps and home directories | ||||||
| posted by Jean-Francois Panisset on Feb. 24, 2014, 2:20 p.m. (1 day ago) | ||||||
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| Thread Tags: discuss-at-studiosysadmins | ||||||
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Like everyone else, we run into situations where renders saturate our production BlueArc cluster, and since we are also serving apps/pipeline and home directories off that box, interactive performance becomes unacceptable. And with only 2 heads and a shared storage backend, there are only so many games you can play trying to shuffle things between heads and storage tiers. So time to move that stuff off to a separate server. For apps and pipeline code, very few machines need to update that stuff, the vast majority of systems would access read-only, so it would seem that a "read optimized" system would make sense. You also don't need a ton of space, as the working set of app and pipeline code versions being accessed at any one time is pretty small. So you might be able to get away with SATA drives and a reasonable amount of RAM so you could cache the majority of reads. For home directories (and roaming profiles), I'm guessing a highly uncorrelated mix of tiny reads and writes, so SSD storage is probably required? Our environment is primarily Windows 7 based. Have people successfully built "small" servers based on 2012R2 for these types of applications? Or are there "off the shelf" solutions that have been found to work well? I just can't afford to buy an additional BlueArc cluster just for those applications I'm afraid. On the other hand, these are still facility critical servers, if they fail no one can get any work done. Not looking for someone to do my homework for me :-), just recommendations of what people have found works well in their facility for these specific applications. JF |