What will overload my server?

[citizen]

My management wants to know when our server is going to start to experience performance problems.
What's going to give us issues? Indexes? Number of users? Amount of data?

Here is our situation:
6500 users with no configured mailbox limits and an average mailbox size is 1.2GB (pre-archived)
2 HP DL380 servers with dual quad core xeons, 16GB RAM, W2K8 x64
SQL 05 is on a seperate cluster
Storage on our SAN via iSCSI

With 400 users and 1TB of data already archived the server idles all day.
Our policy is to only archive items older than 180 days if they have an attachment.
We expect 6TB+ of data after everyone is archived; then grow from there.

Your thoughts are appreciated,

James!

[MichelZ]

Hi

Usually, the archiving window (indexing) is the limiting factor, which is constraint by CPU ressources.
Your server seems to be strong enough to handle the archiving window for 6500 users, I believe.

As your archiving strategy is not very aggressive, users probably almost never need to recall elements, and the server does what you observe during the day, it idles ;)

Btw... EV is a 32-bit app, and cannot take advantage of the 16 GB RAM. You can put them in your SQL cluster if you want... ;)

Cheers
Michel

[GertjanA]

I'm running EV-servers on vm-ware. 2 processors, 4gb ram. more than enough to keep the mailboxes to the limt defined.
sql might benefit from the extra ram..

[citizen]

Yes, 16GB is overkill...Interesting though, the active node actually finds use for 8GB of RAM while idle. The passive uses about 3GB.

So if I understand - the CPU/archiving window issue would be the server cannot find enough time to archive enough mail (due to lack of CPU power) and could start to fall behind in it's archiving duties? Can you explain a bit more about the indexing and how that relates?

Sounds like SQL could become the issue. So what process or processes on EV tax the SQL server?

Thanks,