[RESOLVED] LAMP h/w, if you had carte blanche?

[ixalmida]

Okay, I don't truly have carte blanche...I've committed to using a free Linux distro (probably openSuSE 11, with potential for moving to SuSE Enterprise in future). The purpose of this server is for my company's "Client Portal". We're a smaller company, but the portal is for clients like Capital One, Dell, Intel, Chevron, and Microsoft. We aren't certain how hard the site will be hit yet, but there can be no glitches or issues.

I need to come up with server requirements because the server hasn't been purchased yet. This will probably be a LAMP server running on VMware under 64-bit Windows 2003 (not set in stone, but easiest for my Windows-centric network admin). We are limited on space since this server has to fit in a mostly-full rack at our co-lo site.

The only external storage is NAS and I'm not sure how to integrate that into a LAMP server, so I think that's out. Maybe I'd use it for file uploads. I don't know if we'll allow file uploads at this point but they will probably be small files, if any.

Given the above scenario:
- What would you recommend for CPU power? Will 2 quads versus 4 quads make any difference to a VM?
- Should I create a separate VM to host MySQL?
- How much memory would you allocate? (If separate MySQL box, how much for each?)
- Since we are limited on physical space, we may be limited to a couple of mirrored SAS drives. Is there anything I should worry about with RAID performance?
- Any other "gotchas" that you can think of that might impact server requirements?

Thanks in advance!

[ixalmida]

Forget all that 🙂

Here's my prediction (purely guesswork):
- Max 500 active web clients at any one time
- Max 100 active DB queries (mostly SELECT) at any one time

Here's what I'm thinking:

• Apache/PHP VM and MySQL VM running on the same box
• Allocate 2 virtual-CPUs to each VM
• Allocate 4 GB memory to Apache/PHP VM
• Allocate 4 GB memory to MySQL VM
• Allocate 40 GB for Apache/PHP VM
• Allocate 120 GB for MySQL VM
• Will map to NAS for storing potential uploads
• Will try installing openSuSE 11, x64 - but will fall back to 32-bit if that fails

Is this overkill? Not enough?

Obviously, I'm going to have to monitor this setup a bit and tune it, but I'm just looking for some initial feedback.

Thanks.