Any need to buy Dual proc machines for AD/DNSDHCP (300 users)

  • Thread starter Thread starter Marlon Brown
  • Start date Start date
M

Marlon Brown

I am planning to deploy 15 domain controllers on branch offices. Each branch
office contains 100-300 people/Win32 machines.

I think I will be getting Single CPU, 2GBRAM, 4 Hard-drive machines,
Redudant NICs, Redudant Power Supply.

If you in your experience you believe I could benefit from Dual Proc
mahcines for such small branch offices, please advise.
 
Unless you are planning to run many other things on the DCs (not
recommended) you should be fine. Just remember to plan for DFS, AntiVirus,
SUS, and the like. Even then, modern single proc machines usually handle
well.
 
Marlon Brown said:
I am planning to deploy 15 domain controllers on branch offices. Each branch
office contains 100-300 people/Win32 machines.

I think I will be getting Single CPU, 2GBRAM, 4 Hard-drive machines,
Redudant NICs, Redudant Power Supply.

If you in your experience you believe I could benefit from Dual Proc
mahcines for such small branch offices, please advise.
Click to expand...
We have a mixture of hardware specs for our DC's here. Some have two CPU's,
some have one, some are hyper-threaded. The reason or that is we didn't
purchase all 25 of our DC's right away, we spread it out and some server
models were superceded by the time we purchased another. It really depends
on what is going to happen in the local site. Personally, I would like to
have a consistent hardware platform across all sites, but it just wasn't
feasabile at the time and looking back on it, it didn't make financial sense
either.

Since you are buying 15 at once, sure, make them all standard, but as needs
increase, make sure that you have the option to add CPU's, memory, etc.
That, and spend the extra money on hardware RAID, you won't regret it.

FWIW, the one thing that should remain constant across all of your DC's is
the RAM. Don't skimp on it. You are doing yourself a big favor by going with
2GB on your machines out of the gate. If exchange is to be run, then go with
2 (preferrably hyper-threaded) CPU's, Exchange really pounds the global
catalog and you want to make sure that there is enough CPU available for not
only GC queries, but everything else a DC does like kerberos, LDAP, etc.
 
I would say to by dual CPU (XEON with 2mb cache). If this is a new purchase
of equipment, then get x64 EMT systems which support both 32 and 64 bit
operating systems and makes it much easier to up grade to 64-bit later on.
This will also help in planning your Global Catalog design if you are
planning to deploy Exchange in the future.

Note: Intel has a roadmap and processor selection guidelines for deploying
servers. Remember that Active Directory is a database in its strictest
sense. Do not treat these systems like desktop PCs. It will become very
expensive later on. If you are thinking about getting dual processor systems
with 1-processor, then you can go this route and upgrade to a second
processor if needed which I think you will for 300 users connectivity.
Memory should be sufficient if you are not planning on running any database
apps. In department which contains more than 250 users that requires a lot
of file sharing, then max the memory to 4-GB.
 
Back
Top