To partition or not to partition, that is the question

Hi All,

Just trying to get a feel from the Notes administrator community on the potential pitfalls or hopefully lack of them when using partitioned domino servers on Wintel in production.

We are currently planning a global consolidation of our servers and the use of domino partitions on Wintel is under consideration to achieve the required reduction in physical server count. Basically, highly specced servers each running a mail and an apps domino partition, which is then clustered to a mirror configuration. Unix is not an option at the moment.

However, within a pretty experienced team of Notes admins, the general gut feel is that we’ve never seen domino partitions on wintel in production solutions before, only for DR / test / appdev / etc environments, and may be opening a potential can of worms.

So, I’d appreciate any experienecs from users out there who have experience of domino partitions on Wintel - good or bad. Are our gut feel reservations unfounded and it all runs hunky-dory or is it a solution generally not to be touched with a bargepole.

Any feedback appreciated.

Cheers, Paul

Subject: To partition or not to partition, that is the question…

I’m not an admin so i can’t answer your question directly…

But have you thought of virtualization - people I know use VMWare (for instance) to run several Windows servers on a single machine (not sure what it is though).

And I believe it supports clustering as well…

Subject: To partition or not to partition, that is the question…

I’ve had a three partition server running for several years. I guess the real issue is how busy these servers are and what kind of resources are you propared to through at them. One of the key resources is the amount of memory. From my experience this trumps processors, but obviously the more of both the better. We are running it on an NT4 box and will probably move to Linux in the future.

Subject: RE: To partition or not to partition, that is the question…

In terms of hardware sizing, you may want to look at dna-portal.net .