I’ve read the Lotus documentation (links below) for running Domino in an ESX environment. I’m looking for advice from people with real world scenarios and experience.
I’m setting up a Windows 2003 server with Domino 8.5.1 and Traveler 8.5.1 to support about 30 mobile users–Windows Mobile and iPhone. I was going to assign it 2GB of ram. I’m wondering if that is more than necessary. If I can save the RAM for another VM, I’d rather do that.
I currently have a Windows 2003 server with Domino 8.0.2 FP2 and Sametime 8.0.2. It has 2GB of RAM but only uses about 8% of that and peaked at about 13 according to the performance report from the past week.% So I may reduce the RAM on this to 1GB. That’s what makes me think the Traveler server may function fine with 1 GB.
A server with mail files would require more resources, presumably. For Traveler, the documentation states that the server must have access to the users mail files. And putting the server in the LocalDomainServers group. Do those files need to be on the Traveler server? If not, what are the peformance issues if the mail files reside on the users’ mail server?
We are using Lotus Domino (incl. Traveler) in VMWare environment. Last week we changed to version 8.5.1. We have assigned 1,5 GB for the VM and that appears to be more than sufficient.
More important is to assign 2 cores to the VM. We did it by setting up resource pools, so that the capacity of the CPU’s is shared with other VM’s. Two cores definitely increases the performance of your machine. Please note that by using resource pools, Lotus counts 2 CPU’s when it comes to the subject of licenses and processor value units.
The real answer here is - Try it out an see. You can always increase the ram on the VM later if running too high. As a basic guideline, Traveler generally requires about 512MB free mem. That may be lower in your case if only using 30 users and the mail files are on a different mail server. I.E. The mail files do not need to be on Traveler server, Traveler just needs to be able to locate them, which is usually accomplished by replicating the addressbook from the mail server to the Traveler server.
Note: Traveler mem use is in addition to the Domino Server. So 512MB for Traveler plus whatever Domino uses plus OS and any firewall/antivirus software. In practice I’d say 1.5GB may be the lowest you would want to go - but experiment a little and you should find a good spot. If too low Traveler will terminate with out of mem error or will not be able to start - so you will know if not enough mem.