hi all lotus experts here:
please give your opinions, personal experiences and feelings about the following 2 questions:
which is the best platform for ND6? windows nt/2k/xp/2k3, linux, solaris, aix, hpux… , for what? perfromance, stability, scalability, cost or others?
which is the best way to expend a ND6 system? to upgrade processors, memory, disk space, adding nodes or others? why?
thanks a lot!
bbao
Subject: Domino 6 Platform - general question (OS and upgrade)
Yes, it all depends. I consult for various companies. Two of them are small and are sufficiently served running on a high powered Windows Server 2003 box. A third customer of mine is a large international bank. Right now they run three clustered Windows 2000 Server boxes and use a third party physical load balancing switch in lieu of Domino’s ICM to route work in the cluster. This customer has plans to grow and soon I will be involved in a big project to migrate all their Domino databases from Windows to Linux. So again, like the other person said – it all depends.
Ken
Subject: Domino 6 Platform - general question (OS and upgrade)
It depends, it depends, it depends, it depends, it depends, it depends, it depends . . . . it depends.
As for the OS - what is the predominant OS in your company? Really, Domino works well on all the current support platforms. If you have nothing but Windows servers in your organization, and no real expertise on any other platform, then it would not make much sense to start bringing in Solaris boxes at that point. However, Unix in general is a better-performing platform, so if it’s part of an overall strategy to start migrating application servers to *nix (like it is for our company), then such a platform switch would make sense.
As for upgrades - like I said, it depends. I would start any system with at least a gig of RAM, maybe two. As always, get as much processor/disk space/memory as your budget allows. Keep in mind, though, that Domino is now licensed on a per-CPU basis (in the past, there was one license for 1-4 CPU’s, and another for 5-8 CPU’s).
This is where consulting comes in to play - if you’re really not sure, hire a Domino business partner to come in and look at your environment, and make a good-faith estimate on what your infrastructure needs to support current and future use.