AD newbie needs hardware advice

[Jazz]

Hi all...
Working for a school has it's bad side... mainly low funds.

Having said that, this summer I am getting rid of my old NT 4.0 PDC and
buying a new server for active directory.

My other servers run win 2000, and I have all the licenses for 2000
server, so I am planning on getting the server with no OS and ill load
win 2000 server on it.

I have 300 computers and 5 other servers and wanted so advice on
hardware configuration.

I am looking at about $2,300 from my Dell rep for a poweredge 1850 with
a 3.0 gig xeon, 2 gigs of Ram, and a 73 gig scsi hard drive.

for $2,560 he said he can make it a dual processor.

I am having a hard time beleiving I will need more than the $2,300
configuration. Most of my users use another server for a few database
programs and I have a seperate email server as well. No internal
webserver (other than a seperate OWA server) so I would imagine the
load on this AD server would be low, but I wanted to check with people
who know more than I do first.

Thanks in advance, and if this is the wrong group to post to, i
apologize in advance!
Jazz Mann

 

[Christopher Owens]

I've got about 170 workstations and 18 servers, and at one point I was
running them all off of a single DC that was a Celeron 2.4, 512 ram,
40gb 7200rpm HD. Definitely wouldn't recommend it, but we noticed no
slowdowns or hitches with it. Currently running it on a p4 2.53, 512
ram and 36gb scsi drive with that celeron machine as a second domain
controller for redundancy - we're a nonprofit, so I know how the low
funds ride goes!

So I'd say, if that computer is only going to be a DC, I wouldn't
expect it to be running low on horsepower anytime soon.

 

[Tim.Olsen]

Jazz,

The box you describe is pretty meaty for "just a DC" serving ~300
computers and assuming ~300 concurent users.

I don't see any real advantage to going dual proc. But If you really
think you need dual procs, You should be able to get the same machine
with dual core 2.8 xeons. 2.8Ghz is still plenty of machine for "just
a DC".

On a budget, you may do better to challenge your sales guy to find you
two smaller boxes for $2600. Make them both DC's and buy yourself some
piece of mind in reduancy and simplified DR. I've got three P3 1.4Gh
machines servicing ~6000 users and ~350 servers. The machines are
barely taxed, running domain services --AD/DNS/DHCP/WINS/DFS

Regards,
Tim.Olsen

 

[Jazz]

wow, thanks guys. Awesome advice.
This is now my favorite newsgroup. I was expecting at LEAST 5 post
making fun of me by people looking to boast their egos (like in so many
newsgroups).

Thanks for the nice, honest (and helpful) answers.
Jazz Mann