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I'm in the process of migrating a SBS 2003 to SBS 2011. The new server is installed on a HP DL360 with ESXi 4.1, having 38GB RAM, a 2.53Ghz E5649, 4*300GB SAS RAID1+0. My questions are:

  • Should I install the SBS Premium Add-on on a separate server or just keep one server and install SQL on it?
  • What's the benefit of having a separate server just for SQL, which takes additional ressources (e.g. RAM and disk space for OS) to keep everything running?

Please note that this is a setup for 15-20 users and not many heavy duty processes will be running.

Skyhawk
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Joseph jun. Melettukunnel
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  • That seems excessively high amount of resources for 15-20 typical office users. We have 8-12GB RAM for SBS 2008 and 2011 running all bells and whistles (Exchange, Sharepoint, BES, plus a Line of Business app or two) flawlessly. – gravyface Mar 26 '12 at 22:30
  • This investment should stay for a couple years.. And we got the RAM for a bargain price ;-) – Joseph jun. Melettukunnel Mar 27 '12 at 06:08

2 Answers2

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Second server. The reason is that SQL server is designed to fully utilize the resources given, so a second server can be fully dedicate to SQL. Additionally the sql server can be patched without taking down your entire windows server environment The amount of overhead (ram and OS ) is fairly small.

Jim B
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  • The SQL Server has only about 15-20GB of data. How many CPU cores (out of 6), RAM and disk space would you recommend for a separate (virtualized) server? – Joseph jun. Melettukunnel Mar 27 '12 at 08:45
  • Liek any other virtualization exercise, you need to measure the baseline load (cpu mem and disk IO) and size appropriately. If that information is unavailable I'd start at 1 CPU and a few gbs of ram and see what the utilization is like. Your first bottleneck should be disk. Follow the vmware virtulization guide here: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/sql_server_best_practices_guide.pdf – Jim B Mar 27 '12 at 16:44
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If you have ESXi, why not virtualize an SQL Server?

Canadian Luke
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  • Disk performance (random read/write IOPS, not MB/s) is usually the main reason to be careful about virtualizing a database server. It's one thing if your virtual machines are on a high-performance ZFS iSCSI target with SSDs caching reads and writes, and quite another if your virtualization server has only direct-attached storage in RAID5. – Skyhawk Mar 27 '12 at 06:42