Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Reminder Oct 10 2023 Deadline

Just a reminder that the Server 2012 EoL is less than 2 months away. I only have 5 upgrade slots left. Send me a PM if I missed you. I know I have not been on the forum much.

A cool screenshot of one of our Gen 2 Servers that had 100% uptime for over 2300 days/6 years. Clean power makes an insane difference. If you ever lease space from a building attached to a hospital, usually they have filtered and steady power.
Screenshot:

On your website I noted Lenovo workstations as servers. This is a good deal cheaper and faster than official "servers". Any trouble running Server 2019 on workstation processors like a Xeon W?

We use them as a base. But there’s a lot of tweaks that we do. Server storage pricing has gotten a bit insane. I didn’t want to charge people $1500 bucks per TB of storage so we adapted. Most of what we do is geared towards central computing. Just because you get the equivalent specs will not get you the same software set up which is 90% of what a server is.

For traditional server client or P2P, you’re really wasting your money on high core count and high memory. SQL express is limited to four cores, 1 GB memory. (The other services can easily use 10GB though) My recommendation, for that would be the fastest quad/hexacore you can find, 16-24gb of RAM. All the server is doing is responding to SQL requests and storing files. Higher core count servers will actually be slower!

Sandeep,

What is your recommendation for RAM on a server using VMs? The host won't need much memory, but the VMs will and you will need to assign RAM. So, that server would likely need more RAM no?

I'd say an extra 4GB if you're using virtualization. Main thing is storage though. Get double what you need if you're going to use things like snapshots. You shouldn't need multiple VM's.

Thanks.

Got it. So workstation class processors are a good fit for a small office server? 6 core fast clock speed - Xeon W-2235 3.8ghz (turbo 4.6).

I'm looking at used Dell 5820 workstations with above processor for use as AC server in a VM. No need for VDI.

The only thing is Server 2019/22 are not officially supported on Xeon W. Have you had success running on this type of workstation processor?

These workstations accommodate NVMe SSDs easily whereas it's still uncommon in traditional "servers".

Also I use an NVMe Optane 905 1tb SSD via pcie adapter for my current 10 yr old server and it speeds things up a bit (although not as much as would expect for putting the entire DB + VM on essentially ram disk.)

There are some issues running those types of processors on Windows Server OS's. They work fine with Windows 10/11 though out of the box which still has Hyper-V if you want to virtualize.

Optane is discontinued too. I'd say as long as you have a good DR strategy, you could use refurbished hardware. Not many people actually know their restore process or which machine has which data. Especially in a P2P/server client setup. Things seem to be scattered everywhere.

One more note is that if you do want the full server OS. You'll need to go to Server 2022 Standard. The Essentials SKU is only available through major OEMs now. (Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.) That's $1,500 on top of your hardware.

But the good news is that it's no longer a limited version of Windows Server. Appears you get the full functionality of the Standard version.

Any foreseeable issues running Server on a workstation running Microsoft Server supported Xeon 6128?

DELL Precision 7820 INTEL XEON GOLD 6128 CPU 3.40GHZ 32GB RAM

I clean installed evaluation server 2022 and AC 11.3.1 Did not work. AC support said that AC is not certified to work on server 2022, so I installed evaluation 2019 and 11.3.1 and now 11.3.2. It works with some bug in auto backup. Then I bought 2019 license. My original server was Dell with small business server 2012.

You are touching on a sore point I have with Amazing Charts. Amazing Charts is not supported on Windows Server 2022 and SQL Server 2022. Both have been out for some time yet AC does not support them.

My typical client set up is a single physical server with two virtual machines: the first virtual machine is the domain controller. The second virtual machine runs Amazing Charts and other applications as needed (QuickBooks, etc.). Unfortunately, while the host operating system and the domain controller are both Windows Server 2022, the Applications server (AC, Quickbooks, etc.) still has to be Windows Server 2019. An OS that is already almost 5 years old.

JamesNT

Very true. Even Server 2019 is still buggy compared to Server 2016 with Amazing Charts. But most other EHRs are the same. Lytec, MicroMD, Praxis etc are all usually behind a generation. Very few have the development resources to have their software running on the latest OS. Your best bet is to align your upgrade schedule with their cloud services for whatever EHR you use. They tend to skip a generation to minimize their licensing costs.

Server 2012 to Server 2019. Most of these companies will probably skip Server 2022 and go to Server 2025 or whatever they will call it.