Hey guys,

I'm doing a virtualisation assignment at the moment, and I've got a scenario where a few servers are being consolidated onto one physical machine and virtualised.

What I want to do, in order to spec up the hardware for the new server, is monitor the existing servers. There's four of them, and I'm going to install them all in VirtualBox on my Mac (shhhh - don't tell my lecturer)! One will be over-resourced, another will be crippled, and the other two will be somewhere inbetween so that I get a good spread of results.

What software would you recommend I use to get my results? I've been Googling perfmon.exe and it looks reasonable.

What are people's thoughts?

TIA

Perfmon works well & is free (although it uses some resources itself)
Microsoft System Centre is good for monitoring Windows boxes as well. There should be a free trial on the Microsoft site.
Nagios is good for Linux solutions.

Although in the real world you'd just work out what the budget was, spend half on a server & the other half upgrading the IT teams PC's

Cheers for that sas.

We've not been given a budget.

In the brief it says that the client is looking for value, and as long as a purchase is justified then it will be fine. Slightly odd if you ask me, but oh well! At least this way, I will be able to get some stats and figures which I can use to justify my chosen hardware.

server alive may well also do what you want.
http://www.woodstone.nu/salive/

I'd imagine you won't go far wrong with a bog standard HP DL380 or similar. Unless you're hammering it the main thing would be to get loads of RAM and enough disk space. Just bare in mind that having 4 servers coming off the same disk may mean that bog standard 7k SATA disks aren't up to it.

As for your monitoring you need to decide what to monitor, Are you monitoring some form of hardware stat eg CPU or RAM usage, availability under load or another metric search as transactions / min?



The Microsoft system center [sic] is worth looking into as is Nagios. The latter is a bit fiddly to setup if you're not used to compiling Linux programmes from source and can't find any RPMs or DEBs.

A DL180 G6 with 2x processors, 24GB RAM & 8x 300GB 15k SAS drives should be fast enough for most needs.
You could always swap the data drives for fusion-io drives if you needed more iops (although that wouldn't be cheap).

Cheers for the replies.



Well I'm concentrating on the hardware, because I'm hoping to be able to justify a particular spec through my stats. I'm not sure how I'm going to simulate the servers actually being used - at first I thought I might write some scripts, but I think that's a little OTT.

All I really want to be able to prove is that the servers are inadequate - so some data showing that the web server has got no free memory, and is running the CPU at 70% load because somebody is uploading some new data whilst five users are accessing pages on the intranet would be ideal.

I've given the web server 512MB of memory so I should be able to cripple it quite easily!

Apache has a built in tool for simulating web server load called ab.



will launch a total of 100 requests with 5 running at one time.

Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) will probably do what you want it'll monitor both Microsoft & Linux boxes.



Don't bet on that, webserving on that kind of scale won't stretch most modern machines!

That's excellent news! I'll use that to simulate the web server testing then.

Thanks a lot.

If you want to stress the server a bit more then you could stick a database driven site on there. It takes a lot more system resources to deliver content generated with dynamic content, ie php, asp.net etc than static HTML or images.

Cheers for the input everyone - got the data I needed.

Now I've just got to spec up the new system. Lick ya finger and stick it in the air job I think!

Don't forget to cost for software licences and a UPS! BTW you can usually get VMWare ESX server or Hyper-V for free but need to pay for the more advanced tools to manage them.

Our E-Shops were runnuing on dual core servers with between 1 and 4GB RAM, the 1GB servers could easily cope with several hundred transactions a second (custom E-Shop, written in PHP with a MySQL backend). The "big" shop was running on 4 dual processor servers with 4GB each, running through a load balancer, they could handle the 50% and 75% sales and PayPal newsletter days easily (several hundred thousand hits) as well as acting as a B2B hub for half a dozen partner websites.

We currently use a pair of HP DL360G5s for Windows Terminal Services. They support 30 users, 4GB RAM and they are running Office and Navision manufacturing system. With 18 users currently logged on and working, they are showing a under 5% processor load and under 2GB memory usage.

I want to start virtualising here as well, but too much to do at the moment...

Let us know if you need a hand.
I spec systems for a living (the joys of being the companies systems architect)

I've done several systems in the last year or so as well.