Hi Chris,

We own the hardware and it is at a co-host location that has redundant internet trunks.

There's a SAN, and several hosts (Blade servers). All the VMs reside on the SAN, and they are instantiated on one of the hosts. There's a separate "performance storage" with SSDs in the SAN, and that's where the disk images for the storage servers live. The VMs are stored in regular HDD RAID storage on the SAN.

The SAN takes care a lot of the redundancy on site. However, I know there is an incremental backup created every 45 minutes which is transferred away from the cohosting site.

Tracy

-----Original Message----- From: ProfoxTech [mailto:profoxtech-bounces@leafe.com] On Behalf Of Chris Davis Sent: Monday, November 23, 2020 11:23 AM To: profoxtech@leafe.com Subject: RE: Opinions on Servers

Thanks Tracy

So, you would typically have the clients RDP'ing into one server to run the .exe in turn accessing the dbf's on another VM acting as a file server?

How are the physical drives configured, is there any redundancy if anything fails or you using some VM magic?

Thanks

Chris.

-----Original Message----- From: ProfoxTech profoxtech-bounces@leafe.com On Behalf Of Tracy Pearson Sent: Monday, 23 November 2020 14:54 To: profoxtech@leafe.com Subject: RE: Opinions on Servers

Hi Chris,

We get away with 1 CPU core per server in a VM to get good performance accessing DBFs on a different VM. More CPU cores may help by allowing the server to spread out on additional cores. We don't see a lot of CPU usage per VM. The bottle neck appears to be IO access to the DBFs. With that said, we have over 20 machines that allow a Remote Desktop like connection and 5 separate storage VMs for our 4000+ clients.

The fastest drives you can get (SSD's are a good choice) and a good backup solution.

HTH, Tracy

-----Original Message----- From: ProfoxTech [mailto:profoxtech-bounces@leafe.com] On Behalf Of Chris Davis Sent: Monday, November 23, 2020 9:04 AM To: profoxtech@leafe.com Subject: Opinions on Servers

Hi All

Just a general question ...

If you was choosing a server which would run a vfp application using standard dbfs as fast as possible for around 30 users (connected via remote desktop). What server would you choose to get the best performance?

Is it CPU's , Hard Drive Configuration, Memory etc ... we can assume that there is sufficient memory for the remote desktop side of things.

Thanks

Chris.

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Hi Alan

Yes sorry I didn't make it clear, this is an RDS server so the .exe and DBFs will be on the same machine. So it sounds like the main consideration to make the application work as quickly as possible is the disk.

Typically in the past we would have had 4 15k rpm HDD's running in a Raid 10 configuration. We are thinking maybe SSD or NVMe will make a massive difference but not sure how much of a difference taking into account the cost.

Regards

Chris.

-----Original Message----- From: ProfoxTech profoxtech-bounces@leafe.com On Behalf Of Alan Bourke Sent: Tuesday, 24 November 2020 08:45 To: profoxtech@leafe.com Subject: Re: Opinions on Servers

If you was choosing a server which would run a vfp application using standard dbfs

It won't be running a VFP application (unless it's the RDS server too), it'll just be providing access to a shared folder with DBFs in it. So disk and network throughput is very important.

-- Alan Bourke alanpbourke (at) fastmail (dot) fm

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Thanks Christof, I think trying a Raid 10 array with 4 SSD's seems like a good way forward for us as its not a massive change to the norm.

Thanks for your input.

Regards

Chris.

-----Original Message----- From: ProfoxTech profoxtech-bounces@leafe.com On Behalf Of Christof Wollenhaupt Sent: Tuesday, 24 November 2020 11:17 To: profoxtech@leafe.com Subject: Re: Opinions on Servers

Yes sorry I didn't make it clear, this is an RDS server so the .exe and DBFs will be on the same machine. So it sounds like the main consideration to make the application work as quickly as possible is the disk.

Typically in the past we would have had 4 15k rpm HDD's running in a Raid 10 configuration. We are thinking maybe SSD or NVMe will make a massive difference but not sure how much of a difference taking into account the cost.

VFP is IOPS intensive, so anything you can do to increase that number will directly benefit VFP applications. An array of 4 SSDs equals to an array of 150 15K SAS disks in terms of IOPS. If SSD is an option when considering that server grade SSDs are more expensive, I'd definitely go with SSD. I don't think NVMe would make a big difference here over 6 Gb/s SSDs. Depending on how many different channels you have to access SSDs, they already deliver 15-60 MB/s per user minimum. Plus a TS with local DBF files can actually cache data that is most used unlike TS that access a NAS or SAN.

The other issue is memory. Without reconfiguring Window a VFP application can make use of up to 2 GB of memory. For 30 users working mainly with this application you probably peak out at 96 GB RAM. It's a little more if you run browsers and Office in addition to the VFP application. On the other side of the spectrum I wouldn't run on anything less than 32 GB these days.

-- Christof [excessive quoting removed by server]