The new server is installed!

We installed the new server yesterday. It has new disk drive technology on it that I have not seen or used before. The drives are very small - the 2.5" size that are used in laptops. They are still hot-swap so they cost an arm and a leg more. We set up the OS and the SQL Server transaction logs on their own mirrored sets on the server itself. For the data we had to go to an external storage enclosure which holds regular sized hot swap drives. The data drives are set up on RAID 1+0 - mirrored sets of a striped set. So even though the drives are 300GB each and we have eight of them, we only have 1.2TB of usable space. We split that into two logical drives of 558GB each - NTFS overhead takes up the rest.

The new rack is installed!

You know I must be a major geek when I get excited about a new server rack. But here it is. Isn't it a beauty? It's the empty black one on the left - an APC Netshelter. As you can see our old rack was not a standard size rack. The new rack is taller and deeper. The server, external storage enclosure, UPS and auxiliary battery unit are all in boxes in the server room today ready to be installed tomorrow. We have a new HP TFT7600 slide-out rack mount keyboard & monitor to take the place of the old desktop units that look so out of place in the old rack.

That's an Avocent 8-port KVM switch under the three HP Proliant servers in the old rack. We will continue to use it on the old rack since six servers are still on that side. You may be wondering what that aluminum duct is behind the new rack. We have an auxiliary portable air conditioner to help the underpowered wall unit we put in the server room last year. The wall unit was a disappointment. It was supposed to replace the portable AC but never did put out the advertised BTUs so we continued to use them both.

The old SQL server is the top unit in the old rack. It is an HP Proliant DL380 G3 - Dual Xeon 3.1Ghz processors, 1GB memory, 256GB RAID 5 storage. It is the most overloaded server I have ever worked with. I would never load it up this way. It was set up before I came on board. Not only is it running SQL Server 2000, it is also our master domain controller for Active Directory as well as our file and print server, DNS and WINS. It is an Application Server hosting our accounting system, our payroll system and our backup system - Symantec Backup Exec 11d with the LTO 3 tape attached. It runs our internet tracking database (yes, we automatically track everywhere our employees go) and our Jetnet database of available aircraft for sale.

I have tried to reduce the load by offloading DHCP, RRAS, SMTP Gateway, Anti-Virus and lots of other applications to other servers over the years. Talk about single point of failure. I wonder if my predecessor really understood how severs should be setup. Either he thought one server could handle everything or maybe he just didn't know how to get additional servers funded. This is the third new server I have added in the last two years. Next year I hope to put in new server hardware to support Exchange Server 2007.

Why we decided against shadow copies

One of the nice features of Server 2003 is the ability to make Shadow Copies of shared folders. Shadow Copy (aka VSS - Volume Snapshot Service) allows you to schedule snapshots of your data and then automatically save them. The users can then revert to a previous version of a file when they have a brain fart and overwrite or delete something accidentally.

While R2 of Server 2003 allows a new type of shadow copy called differential, which is actually much more efficient, we are still running Standard Edition SP2 on most of our servers. Thus we are stuck with the only option of scheduling a snapshot every so often - typically 7am and noon. You don't want to do it more often as it definitely affects I/O and therefore user annoyance.

While having a recent backup of a file elsewhere on the file server would come in handy, here's why we decided that implementing VSS would not be advantageous to our organization. VSS works best with a separate volume, preferably on a different physical disk. This improves performance and decreases the chances of data being overwritten on high I/O servers.

While we have about 150GB available on a 256GB array, it has all been configured in two volumes: the OS and data. We would have to completely wipe out and reconfigure our array in order to follow Microsoft best practices. I suppose I could turn on VSS with the existing volume configuration but with up to 64 available Shadow Copies disk space is quickly consumed.

Besides, how often do I really need to do a restore? I use Backup Exec and have a NAS with three days of backups always online. I can do a restore from any one of those or pull a tape from anytime over the past twenty days. My file sever is also overloaded with services right now so any more I/O while the shadow copies are created would be a real drag.

Conclusion: We decided that implementing Shadow Copies on our main file server is not a good idea for us a this time. If I were setting up a new file server and had the disk space to spare, I would set the array up properly and turn it on. Perhaps when we migrate to Server 2008 sometime next year we will take advantage of this cool feature.