looking for opinions

[dragonauta]

Hello,

To put some background: I live in Argentina. Our economy is a mess; smal companies can't (or don't want to) afford enterprise grade hardware. So mainly buy budget hardware or (even worst) consumer grade desktop machines AS SERVERS!!!
And then they expect that shitty hardware give excellent performance.

So they want this Server HPE Proliant DL380e Gen6

2 x Intel Xeon E5-2450L 1.8GHz
48 GB DDR3
4 x 2 TB SAS 10K rpm 6Gps
Smart Array P420 Controller.
4 Ports 1GB Ethernet​

TL,DR:
I've been asked to install proxmox and build two KVM (WS 2016 with RDS, 25 CAL each).
I'm really concerned about performance as they want 50 users on this setup.
The use will be just for an ERP application, and users offen open 3 or 4 different instances

My first thought is: No.
But how do I know, I never made this type of setup; with many recurrent users on virtualized WS.
So I'm asking for experiences, opinions, advices. Everything is welcome.
Thank you all

 

[LnxBil]

The servers itself are fast, the CPUs are low power optimized, so not that fast, but should be sufficient. We're using 3 of them in a cluster with attached SAN storage and 72 GB-RAM each.

ERP means database and databases want a lot of I/Os. Only four disks is challenging. If you buy a cache and a battery for your P4x0 controller, you can lift of a little bit of the heavy I/O load. I strongly recommend to use more disks. Do you need a lot of space there? I'd go with more, but smaller disks to increase I/O throughput.

 

[alexskysilk]

I strongly recommend to use more disks. Do you need a lot of space there? I'd go with more, but smaller disks to increase I/O throughput.

So much this. For starters, there were no supported 10k 2TB disk mechanisms available for the DL380G6; even if you found such disks (eg Seagate D10E2400) they will not be in quickspecs and probably 4k native which means they wont work anyway. and even if you found one with 512e, its not best practice to use unsupported drives with RAID controllers engineered for specific disk/firmware models.

I would suggest you do a better due diligence about calculating you required SPACE and minimum IOPs expected/required. Then you can design your disk deployment that will satisfy those requirements. Feel free to reach out in PM and I can put you together with a contact servicing LatAm/South America that can offer more direct assistance.

 

[dragonauta]

Thanks Lnxbil & alexskysilk.

This server will not have any database. ERP they use is just a frontend client that connects to a middleware that interacts with database.
I was concerned about having 50 RDS users on virtualized WS2016 on that hardware.
Also 48GB ram seems too little for 50 users (considering promox->2 kmv).