Server Recommendations for 100+ users on Proxmox VE

[jmfkmii]

Hi guys,

I am looking into using Proxmox for Virtualization for a law firm of 80+ people to use. I do, however, want to plan for expansion into 100-120 employees eventually. What would you recommend as far as server specs for this amount of people? I am just now learning all the ins and outs of this VE so this would start me in the right direction. Any input into this would be great. I am looking to 2X Quad Core or six core CPUs. Would that be enough? How much ram should we be running? Etc.?

Thank you so much...
Joey

 

[mir]

It's impossible to give you any advice until you describe what kind of OS and applications you expect to virtualize. An important parameter is also whether you intend to use shared storage or not and the kind of network you will be using.

 

[jmfkmii]

We will be virtualizing Windows XP Pro.

The applications we will be using are Microsoft Office Professional 2010, Word Perfect X-5, ImageMaster V7, and Chrome for the most part. Nothing that would eat up or need too many resources.

We want to set up 40 GBs of storage space for each user and already have plenty of 1TB 2.5" HDDs for the project.

We will be implementing 2 new 1 Gb switches to run the network on.

 

[mir]

For storage I was thinking about whether you would use a dedicated storage server or not.

Win XP pro! You are aware of the fact that Microsoft will retire win xp within 6 months?

Is your hole idea to virtualize desktops? I don't see proxmox as a prime candidate for virtualizing desktops.

 

[jmfkmii]

The company I work for is extremely cheap. I realize that XP support will be dropped, but I have no other choice because of the previous sentence. We are currently using Terminal Services for our remote users and is a pain. We already have Proxmox set up with a couple VMs running, but they are running extremely slow because the server that was used is old. The VM we have set up as the master runs extremely slow and lags. It is a Dell PowerEdge 1950. It is a single, dual core CPU running 32 GB of RAM, but still lags really badly.

I don't have a lot to work with because my budget is small, and I understand that that is an extremely crappy thing for a business of this size. It has taken me pulling teeth just to get them to give me a $3000-4000 bump for this project.

We will be using centralized storage because we already have user folders setup on our servers.

 

[Cloudrck]

What type of HDD are we talking about? You will probably see issues with I/O throughput. You can never have too much RAM. What model Xeons are you looking at, that makes a big difference.

Any reason for sticking with outdated software and applications? Aside from money constraints? Are people unwilling to learn new, maybe free software that can do the same job, in some cases better. Just wondering.

 

[Telekomiker]

Hi jmfkmii,

I regrette, your budget is to low. But anyway. Take a look into RedHat's Virtualization sizing guide http://www.principledtechnologies.com/Red Hat/RHEV_sizing_0812.pdf.

Best regards

telekomiker

 

[drott]

Hi jmfkmii,

I regrette, your budget is to low. But anyway. Take a look into RedHat's Virtualization sizing guide http://www.principledtechnologies.com/Red Hat/RHEV_sizing_0812.pdf.

Best regards

telekomiker

you are headed down a disasterous path. aka. res ipsa. Thats a first week law school word. If they are not willing to spend the 200-300k to do it right. save yourself the grief and play else where. Look most apps like tabs, amicus and once you get large outlook psts will cause the vms to run off the rails which can affect everyone. Plus there is the minor problem of license, copyright and xp activatation problems. THE BSA folks are rather demanding and no one i repeat noone has won against them.

plus a machine failure and recovery is messey.

Proxmox is more than capable hypervisor. The really cool thing is the ct feature in addition to kvm. There you can stack a lot of machines on even cheap hardware. CT wont work with xp.

Based on information and belief you would be well served find a company that does this for living as a sas model.

 

[anthonysomerset]

I am looking into using Proxmox for Virtualization for a law firm of 80+ people to use.

The company I work for is extremely cheap. I realize that XP support will be dropped,

So wait a law firm is wanting to knowingly put its data in VM's with an outdated and likely very insecure guest OS thats poorly optimised for running in a virtualised environment (tip make sure you install virtio drivers)

i know this is a proxmox forum but Windows Terminal Services is the way to go here - you just need to get it configured and setup right with the right hardware backing it up to start with - it wont be any different to win xp vm's ultimately and will save you a ton on licensing and hassle

that said - assuming that you give each user 2GB ram (1gb aint going to cut it once outlook starts getting huge pst files) and share of 2x cpu cores each

just the crudest of calculations here (not taking into account balooning or KSM tuning)

80 Users * 2GB RAM = 160GB RAM
80 Users * 2 CPU cores - 160 CPU cores

a decent spec dual hex machine gives 24 logical cores to proxmox
so assuming you used best spec dual hex core xeons you would need 7 servers with at least 24gb ram per server
that is assuming that every user gets that 2gb ram and 2 cpu cores dedicated to them

you could probably get away with dropping down to 4 dual hex servers with 48GB ram each if your happy for a little contention on the CPU side

as i say - that is the crudest of minimum estimates

you likely will need to have fibre channel for the shared storage or 10gbe or a dedicated storage network thats at least a couple of gb nics bonded per server (therefore you will need good managed switches)

i somehow dont think $4000 is going to get you everything you need

i feel for you man - but a Law firm of all companies (especially with that many employees) should be doing this right from the start and investing properly in the hardware AND software

 

[gkovacs]

80 Users * 2GB RAM = 160GB RAM
80 Users * 2 CPU cores - 160 CPU cores

While I'm not debating your other points about network, security and outdated software, your CPU calculation has nothing to do with the real world, consequently the OP does not need 7 servers. According to the excellent Red Had virtualization guide pasted in an above post, you will be able to run roughly 7-10 Windows7 guests per CPU core, and this was for an older Intel architecture (X5670 are Westmere, current Sandy/Ivy Bridge Xeons are considerably more efficient).

So the OP will probably be fine with one dual socket Xeon E5 CPU server (2x 6 physical Ivy Bridge cores, 24 logical cores) and 128 GB RAM (assuming KSM is working), although I would get 192GB RAM just to be sure. For storage, you will absolutely need SSD caching, so I suggest you look into the Adaptec high-end range or check what Dell has on offer, but get at least 256GB of SSD cache for your multi-terabyte array.

Are you virtualizing the servers (mail, file storage, etc.) as well?
What spec are the client machines accessing the virtual desktops?
What about failover / high availability? A single server goes down and 80 people sit idle for days?

 

[gkovacs]

An interesting (and probable more cost-effective) solution would be - instead of buying one dual-socket hexa-core Xeon server - to buy four off-the shelf nodes specced like below, and put them into a Proxmox VE cluster.

Intel Q87 based motherboard (with AMT remote management)
Intel Core i7-4770 CPU (quad-core, 8 logical CPUs)
32 GB RAM
Adaptec RAID w/ 128 GB SSD cache
4-8x 1TB HDD in RAID10

This way you would have 16 physical CPU cores (instead of 12), much more storage bandwidth and IOPS, but most importantly you would have 4 times the availability than a single server.
Provided you create network backups, should any node fail the other 3 would be able to handle the load until the faulty node is replaced. Not to mention this would probably be cheaper, and much easier to expand later: if you have more VM's to run, you just buy another node.

 

[wahmed]

I suggest you take a look at this post http://forum.proxmox.com/threads/16106-Volunteers-Wanted-to-test-Virtual-Machine-Cloud-Platform!
and i believe it somewhat similar setup as you are intending to do. You will also see the type of hardware used in this project. The test platform in this project running 49 virtual desktops at this moment simultaneously. Of course they are not being used heavily as real world.

I totally understand about your budget issue. Sometimes you just gotta do with what you have. As gkovacs mentioned in above post, if you are indeed going down that route, DO NOT do it without at least 4 server nodes. Instead of spending all cash on super Xeon single host get couple i7 and i5 to the least. The biggest advantage in Xeon motherboard is the ability to put much higher quantity RAM than 32GB limit of desktop boards.

If you want to give your lawyer user a very stable Storage platform, I suggest using CEPH. Others may suggest storage such as DRBD, but i have very little knowledge about it. Personally i think the redundancy and minimal downtime of CEPH is unmatched.

Unless you divide your 100 users in 50 user group you will have very tough time with 1GB network infrastructure. You can use multiple switches and nics to minimize cost and still achieve about the same goal. The biggest issue with using Virtual Desktops using Proxmox and SPICE is video playback. It sucks. I do not believe it is proxmox issue, but SPICE itself. Later versions might and should make it much smoother.

If your users not going to playing much video for their cases, i believe you can achieve what you are after within your budget, as long as your employer understands the network performance will be tiny bit slow.

I hope all these gives you something to think about.

 

[rugby]

This is the very reason why we don't deal with law firms in our business. They never want to pay to do things the right way.