Server Choice - to improve performance

Michael Lennon:
We need to improve the performance of our Raiser's Edge database which has been poor since migrating to a virtual environment (Hyper-V). I'm looking at the following two options and would appreciate feedback based on your experience as to which would be best in terms of performance primarily. We are also considering a look at flash-based SAN. Option 1 (New Virtual Environment) New Dell 420 Server running Hyper-V as part of a two-server cluster. The new server would be configured for maximum RE performance (assuming this can be done - I'm new to virtualisation) but would run at least one other virtual machine, probably more than one. The server will run a E5-2407 v2 six core processor with as much RAM as we can throw at it. Local SAS disks for storage. Option 2 (Dedicated Server) Existing IBM x3530 M4 server (Xeon E5-2420, six core). 48GB RAM. Local SAS disks for storage. This server currently runs our single Hyper-V host which holds 7 VMs. Our Raisers Edge database is just over 20GB with 80k+ constituents and 1.5m+ gifts.

David Wanless:
Hi Michael, We've been there. We had a long and painful struggle to improve performance after virtualising our RE server. Moving from 2 to 4 VCPUs made a useful difference. The biggest blockage though was eventually shown to be disc performance. We had heaps of RAM. I'd put much more emphasis on your discs than your RAM. We've recently done some testing on Amazon Web Services and shown that even small RAM allocations (as little as 8GB, to our great surprise) are fine as long as we have good discs. I'd have thought local SAS discs would be fine but it's important how you arrange them. They should be directly available to your VM as dedicated separate RAID arrays for data, log and possibly temp files. They should definitely not be presented, as we had, as a single, large virtual drive. We even got a useful performance improvement by increasing the block size on our drive to 64kB. Best of luck, David.