Capacity/resource planning for CMS server

[ms.tim]

Hy guys, and girls :)
We have around 100+ HP/CPQ servers which would be monitored.
The CMS server that is planned for is DL380G3, 6*146,8 disks, 4GB of RAM, Windows 2000 Advanced Server.
The Problem is that it is also used as an application consolidation server so we have about 4 more applications on it with audience of about 200 users.
CMS would be used only! for monitoring and not for management. It is planned to collect SNMP traps from server and forward them to Tivoli TDW server.
Any contribution in this discussion is very welcomed.
Tnx in advance.

[David Claypool]

I'm not sure what you mean by "only for monitoring and not for management." If all you are looking for is an event receiver, your Tivoli should suffice. You can download the free integration module for Tivoli from http://www.hp.com/servers/manage --> Management Integration Modules.

In general, HP SIM is more I/O intensive than CPU intensive. With that generalization, more memory is better than less, faster drives (15K vs 10K) and RAID 0+1 (vs RAID 5) will result in faster performance. As part of this, keep in mind that the DL380G3 has an Ultra3 RAID controller, so even if you have purchased Ultra320 drives you aren't getting that extra speed unless you have bypassed the on-board controller with a controller in a slot.

Additionally, during discovery and identification operations quite a bit of network traffic can be generated so you might consider an extra NIC as a cheap way to avoid affecting user experiences on the other applications.

Since your 4 apps + HP SIM probably peak at much different times, you might consider using a resource allocation product such as the ProLiant Essentials Workload Management Pack (disclaimer: one of my jobs in real life is as the product manager of WMP). WMP would allow you to allocate priority, processor affinity and memory access to each application pool, plus write rules that would allow them to expand or contract on demand.

If you post some additional details (like the speed and number of CPUs and whether or not HyperThreading is enabled) and information on the applications and the relative importance of them, I can make some specific recommendations about how you might set up the allocations.

You can download WMP with a 30-day evaluation license at http://www.hp.com/servers/manage

[ms.tim]

ok, tnx.
your reply was helpfull but we won't be buying any extra SW or licenses so I'd just have to think of something else.
tnx.

[Andrzej Kowalik]

I agree with David, that SIM "love" I/O, and for that reason I think that you not have to replace array controller, because it not increase I/O number (only disk depend), and therefore 15k rpm disk are better.
If it can help you, I have test environment and measure what's in size, for example, failure notice (disk drive and power supply): average is 1kB. Initial discovery is strongly hardware/software depend, and in my environment was 100-210kB.
regards,
Andrzej