Server consolidation and clustering

HCL Domino Domino Forum
1

Hi Wizards,

My query is w.r.t. to my production setup hance its very important and on high priority.

I have 2 Domino 6.5.1 Servers running on two separate IBM HS20 Blades with Windows 2000 Std. Edition. The hub server has 450+ users and the spoke server has 430+ users. Both these servers also host around 10 small applications. The data of both theses servers in on a NAS.

Now I want to merge the two servers into 1 single server and then use the second server’s hardware for clustering.

However, I have a couple of queries reagrding this before I start my activity…

How many users can a sigle domino server support, because I see the no. of users growing to around 1200 by March 2005?

Which OS would be better to run the cluster on in case I go ahead with my plan. Should I upgrade the current OS to Windows 2003 or change the OS to Linux ES?

What other precautions do I need to take care of in case I proceed with my plans?

Looking forward to your valueable inputs …

Thanks & Cheers,

Shayon.

2

Subject: Server consolidation and clustering

All good questions that you should ask before undertaking such a move.

  1. A few years ago IBM had the world’s record of number of users on ONE server. They put all 350,000 worldwide employees on one server.

  2. The OS is a matter of choice, I would choose Linux because IBM is committed to it.

  3. You should take care to migrate all users from one Box to the other Box and then rebuild the one freed so that it is a cluster.

You may face some other issues when you get to clustering them.

Regards

Rolf Pfotenhauer

3

Subject: One suggestion

I would also choose linux over windows. Have had very good experiences with it.

One of my favorite things is that you don’t have to restart the server if domino crashes, you just remove the tasks with an script.

Somebody else summarized nicely some advantages:

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/46dom.nsf/55c38d716d632d9b8525689b005ba1c0/a9825af7db7bd19985256aab004a3e20?OpenDocument

It is important though to remember that Linux is not all point and click. It does take some learning and knowing to be able to use it. But that is true with every professional system and the upside is: You will work less and be faster in what you do. (i.e. I get the log file much faster on linux than on windows)

Maybe it will also work for you.