Sizing hardware for a 5000 node SIM environment

[Hunt Miller_1]

I am helping a customer try to determine the necessary hardware to manage a 5000 node environment. Is anyone out there doing that now? We are also considering running SIM/SQL on a MSCS platform. Thanks in advance for any help!
Hunt

[David Claypool]

The rule of thumb is...

<500 servers and <5,000 events = MSDE
<5,000 servers and <50,000 events = SQL

So, you are right on the hairy edge of the usually recommended size of an hpSIM with SQL server. Because of that, you may want to customize some of the polling tasks and other things like that (e.g. the server status polling task by default is set to execute every 5 minutes; maybe instead, break that up into several different tasks that only poll subsets of the population--very important servers at 5 minutes down to something like a print server down the hall every 20 minutes or something like that).

Other can chime in with their experiences, but as far as hardware, the requirements are not too steep in this era of 3+ GHz processors and gigs and gigs of RAM. My personal recommendation:

DL360G3 1P 3.06GHz with 1MB L3 cache
2GB memory (you might get away with only 1GB)
15K RPM drives