Hardware recommendations

[nickkovac]

We have been running vault on and off for a while now and I am looking to purchase a new server to support upto 5 developers. I will be running Win2K, MSQL and the latest version of Vault.

Any recommendations as to what is the optimum hardware configuration. I saw someone post that a dual xeon system was running slow. I am thinking of a P4, 2.8 Mhz, 512ram and 80 gb hdd.

Any recommendations?

[jclausius]

You didn't give a budget, so I'm not really taking any of that into consideration here. You should tone down any suggestions to fit more within that constraint.

Assuming all three servers (IIS, Vault Server 2.0.3, SQL Server 2000) will be residing on the same physical machine, I'd suggest a minimum of 1 GB memory. To be honest, the amount of memory really depends on the number of repositories, as well as, the number of nodes in each repository's tree.

As for the disk, its not necessarily the size of the disk, but speed of throughput. If you can swing it, an Ultra SCSI RAID controller with a RAID 0 (striped) for temp storage (tempdb, Vault Server's working folder, etc), and RAID 1 or RAID 5 for the main DB would be ideal. This is going to add some cost due to the number of drives this configuration would require.

It might not be worth the extra cost for five users, but a machine that is SMP capable may not be a bad idea.

These are my personal recommendations. Perhaps others would be willing to opine.

[nickkovac]

Thanks for the feeback. I always like to work with an open ended question and then roll back the requirements once I see what the ideal system is and what I can afford. Hopefully there will be some other people who could post replys as to what systems they found work well.

For the temp and working folder, is there some min/max on how big this potentially will get?

In short, I are we talking about 3 drives -- one for OS, one for temp files and one for the main db?

Sorry, I am more in management than on the technical side. Anyone's feedback is much appreciated.

Nick

[jclausius]

This is one of those questions that can be answered with the phrase, "It depends".

Vault itself uses compression on files, and really only works with changes to files, not the file themselves. If you are using text files, these usually tend to not need much disk space. If you are using large binary files, such as images, at times changes *can* be rather large, especially on 55 MB TIFF files.

SQL Server can be configured to store its temp database on a different drive as well. When vault interacts with the database, this temp database is used as a scratch pad, and will grow accordingly.

Again, the size is not an issue (your 80 GB should be more than enough). It is the I/O throughput that is important for performance. For example, a single ATA IDE controller would be less desirable than getting a SCSI RAID controller.

[Mike Dimmick]

For reference, we're running Vault 2.0.3 on a Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition server which also runs Exchange Server 2003 and is a domain controller. The hardware spec is 1xP4 2.8GHz with 768MB RAM. The database is on a separate system running Windows 2000 SP4 on a 1xP4 2.0GHz with 512MB RAM (and software RAID 1 on two IDE disks as the only volume), which also serves a low-volume website. Vault currently serves 4 concurrent users on a 70MB repository with up to ten check-ins each per day and a couple of recursive gets each of a 44MB project. Delays are mostly unnoticeable - the largest delay is waiting to log in in the morning as Visual Studio starts up (we're mostly using the IDE client).

As you can tell, we're just starting out with version control software. Things may be different when we've migrated a few more projects into Vault, which we're doing on an as-required basis (i.e. as enhancements are made, and for new projects).

Not an ideal setup by any means, but it works.