 |
 |
For typical lightweight applications (Active Directory, Printing, DNS/DHCP) we use about 75% of memory and 15% of the processors. These are lower end systems with dual 1.6 GHz Xeon processors and 18 GB of RAM. Adding memory would allow us to subscribe additional guest systems without taxing the processors. We have database servers in a separate pools that tax both significantly, but have more hardware resources (2 x 3 GHz Xeons w/4 Cores, 24 GB RAM), but still adding memory would be the solution to adding guest systems. In general I think adding more memory would be the way to go. I think the question here is would you bottleneck the processors with 64 GB of memory? What additional applications would you be adding? If you would be OK adding the memory, and the price is a wash, it maybe better just to have an additional host system to distribute load. Also, it makes maintenance on host systems easier to manage. If you would max out your processors and not utilize the expense in RAM, again another host system is probably the better choice. Otherwise, if you can just add enough RAM to cover your applications + some growth and be cheaper, go the memory route. Hope this helps. Thanks, Dennis On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 1:07 PM, Ehren Benson <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > I am seeing huge memory price increases as you scale up in amount (4gb dell > dimms are about $42/gb whereas 8gb dell dimms are $120/gb). So I am just > currious how much memory you use in your virtual hosts and how many hosts > you have? > > Right now we have 2 with 32gb each, at the rate of the price slope, I could > almost add a whole new node to the cluster w/32gb for around 8K (or 2 nodes > w/32gb for 16K) rather than upgrading both existing nodes to 64gb for 14K. > > Yikes! > > Ehren J. Benson, MCSE > > Windows Systems Administrator > > Department of Physics and Astronomy > > Michigan State University > > 1209 A Biomed Phys Sci > > > > [log in to unmask] > > 517-884-5469