On Monday 11 July 2005 22:40, Mike Coan wrote:
We have a small office LAN (10 workstations) We are in the process of replacing our server. For one of our major applications we have to have a Windows Server. My plan is to run SuSE 9.3 x64 on the server, and then run Windows 2003 server as a guest OS using VMWare workstation 5.0.
If you must run windows, then this would be the best way to run it
Windows 2003 is a supported guest of VMWare Wks 5.0. SuSE9.3 x64 is not officially supported, but SLES 9 is and I have read of a number of people successful running VMWare 5.0 on SUSE 9.3 x64.
Yes, I can attest to that, it runs very nicely
Regarding RAID, from what I have read. I would not use the nvidia raid included with the nforce4 boards, but use YAST to set up software raid. My plan is to use RAID 0 (I know that means no redundancy) and then use an additional hard drive for backing up the data files.
RAID 0 is striping and will give you extra speed. But RAID 0 has the huge drawback if one drive fails, the whole thing comes crashing down, and you'll have to reinstall everything.
i am not inclined to use raid 5. Our current server had raid 5 with a Perc controller and 3 Ultra 160 SCSI drives. When one of the drives failed the controller began beeping like crazy, but everything worked Too bad i didn't know what the beeping meant. By the time I figured out what the beeping meant, a second drive failed and I had to reinstall Windows Small Business Server on the remaining drive.
The value of reading manuals. If you had known what the beeping meant, you could have kept the machine running (bar perhaps for the time it takes to throw in a new drive, if the hardware doesn't support hotplugging). This is why people have redundancy. Their time costs more than the hardware