Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Best setup for windows 2012 server for AC 8.2.4

Currently I have a dell t430 server with dual intel xenon E5-2620 processors and 64 Gb of RAM. A 1Tb HD drive (RAID 1) for windows and a 4T (also RAID 1) hard drive for amazing charts.
I am noticing a slow down of speed and so I have bought 2 Tb SSD drive. The questions I have is should I install these to drives as a RAID 1 set up mirroring each other and have both windows 2012 and AC installed on them and use the other drives as backups or should I install AC on a virtual machine on the SSD drive with windows?

The short answer is RAID 1 is more redundant, and SSDs will be faster, but the next performance bottleneck is the RAID card itself.

The higher end the RAID card, the more internal RAM it will have, the more processing power, and the more that the performance of the SSDs will shine through.

All that said, the more users that you have, the more that the SQL version you have will installed will bear on the overall performance at production load.

What versions of SQL server do v7 and v8 ship with it (i'm assuming express)?

Is it easy to upgrade to a real version of SQL and make it work with amazing charts?

SQL Express 32-bit.

The upgrade process is reasonably straightforward, but you will need AC support to do it for you, or use AC certified IT.

In some cases,there are other things that you may run into along the way. We have seen a few.

For hardware I'm a big fan of RAID 10 with 4 to 6 drives, and always a hardware RAID controller. Never software RAID. Dell makes a H710-P raid controller that can't be beat. For drives I prefer to keep SQL data on 300gb enterprise raid 10 array and documents and seldom accessed data (like reports, backups, etc) on a separate array of 1-2 Tb. For most office stuff a RAID 10 is going to be far more reliable than a consumer SSD, and far more economical than enterprise SSD which will cost more than taking your entire staff on vacation to the Bahamas.

ng,

Upgrading from 2005 Express to a Full SQL was not that easy. SQL Server Express 2012 makes it rather easy. Using AC certified IT such as Indy or Sandeep makes sense. Using any certified SQL Server IT makes sense. I wouldn't let AC support do it. Sorry. They are good with AC. But not that good with overall networking/SQL.

Do you have something to back this up? We've been using SSDs in RAID 1 for a several years now and found there's no difference between a RAID 1 SSD and single SSD. For optimized RAID controllers, the read speed is actually higher than 1 SSD.

Even software RAID 1 does match the performance of a single SSD. You don't need a RAID controller with memory for something like RAID 1.

I'm a huge fan of RAID 10, but the IOPS on a RAID 1 with 2 SSD drives would need something like 40 hard drives in RAID 10 to match it. Hardware RAID controllers mainly come into play for parity-based RAID Schemes like RAID 5 and RAID 6 which require significant processing power. RAID 10 HDD for Storage, RAID 1 SSD for database applications.

Also, no one needs enterprise/SLC SSD's. The write endurance people were freaking out about isn't true. It's been debunked. For example, a Samsung 840 Pro (last gen) had a wrtite endurance of 2.1PB (petabytes, 2100 Terabytes). For most practices, a set of pro-sumer SSDs in RAID 1 will work fine. Larger practices may want want too look at different SSDs. These drives have a lower AFR (annual failure rate) than hard drives and 10 Year Warranties on some of them. When was the last time, you saw a 10 year warranty on a computer part?

Virtual machine vs regular

If you have the infrastructure/skills, we are always going to recommend virtual.

Good hypervisor designs result in <5% drag from the host, so performance delta is minimal, and there are significant advantages.

<>hardware independence - upgrade as you will without hardware dependencies
<>ability to test and rollback - you can clone the instance, upgrade the OS/AC/whatever, and then either keep it or toss it.
<>redundancy - if you have an image of the instance off machine, you can come up on another host within minutes
<>discrete testing - we have taken clone instances for practices, run an AC upgrade, then continued to add resources, then upgrade SQL, add resources, etc... so that the practice can assess just what it will cost to achieve comparable performance without having to take the one way ride.

If you plan on expansion or even the possibility, go virtual. If you know that you won't go physical. Physical is much more straightforward in terms of backup and simplicity. For the simple solo practice with just AC, I would go physical. If you start adding billing and accounting, etc. onsite, I would go virtual. There are some licensing costs them come into play depending on your setup. Newer versions of Windows are much better about moving to new hardware in case of failure so that isn't a huge benefit of virtualization anymore.

There are several benefits to virtualizing. Indy covered most of them. Another one is simplified restoration. You can setup something called Replication between two computers that aren't identical (meaning you can use a good primary server and a way cheaper secondary desktop/server). The other machine would be just 30 seconds behind the other so data loss is minimal compared to most backup solutions which are 24 hours behind. We typically implement replication when a person's setup is very complicated involving several virtual machines or the practice is very large and 24 hours is unacceptable data loss. Restoration would simply require turning on the virtual machines at the replica server.

I am in solo practice but have over 7000 patients and seeing 30+ patients a day, there have over the past 2 years we have had our main server go down where we have been unable to see pts for 1-2 days which is not acceptable. The reason it went down initially was hard drive failure once and windows crashed another time that required re installing windows.So as a result I now have 3 servers running in the clinic. 1 running windows 2012 server handling Amazing charts. A second server running 2008 handling my scheduling and billing software Allofactor. And my oldest server running 2008sbs handling DHCP, Faxes etc.
I am interested in using the virtual with replication onto on of the other servers so that if on server goes down due to hard ware failure I can still be up and running. Any tips would he helpful

Many thanks

IMHO, rather than doing replication, if you have two servers and enough storage, may as well go cluster.

JamesNT

Can you do a cluster with different verzions of windows server running or are we talking about using sql as a cluster? If I do a cluster then would a virtual machine not be needed?

Clustering and replication achieve two different things. Clustering is a high availability solution while replication is for disaster recovery scenarios. Think of clustering like having a fully redundant server (like RAID hard drives). All the hardware needs to be exactly matched. Running clusters with mismatched hardware is unsupported. The licensing is much more expensive (you need 2 copies of everything) and requires shared storage. Shared storage means you need something called a SAN. (iSCSI on a NAS also works too though). Also expensive.

There is an enormous difference in cost and they do very different things. Clustering is usually reserved for very large clinics.

Most hardware in servers is already redundant. RAID protects hard drive failures. CPU, RAM, and Mobo are pretty reliable. There are redundant power supplies available. Clustering is essentially like RAID for the whole server. If you have RAID, that should protect against hard drive failure like you mentioned earlier.

Consolidating those servers to a single server using virtualization would streamline your recovery and backup processes. You can also implement replication as a form of rapid disaster recovery. You're going to want to get someone to examine your current setup and determine the best course of action.

Anyone able to help/advise on best way to setup virtual machine with replication onto a second server.

Hi Satis,

You probably won't like this answer, but I think it will be the best one you get. Sandeep even said it in his last post above.

What you want to do is easy if you know how to do it. But, if you don't, you should probably have someone do it for you.

It is really worth it to pay the money to have someone set up your entire setup. Just my two cents.

Never had anyone do this before. Any recommendations on who could do this in the Houston area.

Just Google something like computer networking Microsoft certified and you will get about 250 companies. You want a company that does this as a business. Can provide support 24/7. Will know your whole system. Have three come out. A good company won't even do anything without looking at your setup currently and your needs and give you a quote.