SBS v7 Memory and Resource Usage

Here are some screenshots for you:

Yes, that is the Exchange store weighing in at a comfortable 2GB+ of RAM!

The box itself is not too busy right now, but there will need to be some serious evaluation done on the purposing of the SBS box beyond running SBS and perhaps an AntiVirus management console.

This box is an Intel SR1530HSH Server System running an Intel S3200SH server board with 8GB of RAM. An RS2BL040 RAID controller and three 450GB 15K.7 Seagate SAS drives round out the configuration in RAID 5 as there are only three 3.5” hot swappable drives in this rig.

Based on our initial observations any server needing to run SBS v7 should be at least Quad Core preferably with HyperThreading for a total of 16 threads. It should have 16GB of RAM and preferably have a hardware accelerated RAID controller along with SAS drives.

Since we are a relatively small shop, we will run with the RAID 5 setup on this box until we migrate to the next version of SBS v7. Then we will purpose a pedestal box with a bit more RAM and some extra drives in RAID 10 to see if we notice any performance differences.

We will be shuffling the SharePoint Foundation content database off of SBS v7 and onto a dedicated SQL box to save on some of the migration time for SharePoint. It will also save a bit on the disk I/O and RAM as we use SharePoint _a lot_ in our shop and via the Internet.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer