New Server Setup

1qTour

Looking for a bit of advice/opinions here. We will be setting up a new server at work. It will be hosting various tools, applications and alot of reports, tabular and graphed, for end users.

The current server is a mess and hosts these tools which are written in classic asp w/vbscript to the most part.

These are all written by various users through out the years and some not coded too well. As a result of this and the fact the server is on its last legs the server is unstable and has alot of downtime. It was the test, pre-production & production server for developing all these! Not ideal.

For the new servers (getting a test one one too) we are thinking of going with a setup of either ASP.NET or PHP with a MySQL database. I have a little experience with PHP and ASP.NET and bar some googling done really know the benefits of each for these particular requirements. There are about 300+ users.

Just wondering from your experiences is this a good idea? Is there any other factors that should be taken into account? Also any error tracing software thats descriptive?

Any help appreciated, cheers.

stevenmu

It sounds like you really need virtualisation. Get servers with as much RAM as you can cram into them and CPUs that support hardware virtualisation, and use them to host virtual machines for the users to develop on. The users should then never touch to host server/OS, except maybe to start/stop VMs or provision new ones etc. All development, testing etc should take place within the virtual machines.

If you plan your VMs out well you can have different environments which may be needed held independantly. You can take copies/snapshots of them so if they end up in an unuseable state you can roll back to an earlier snapshot. You could also periodically take snapshots from live back to dev/test so that your dev/test environments have recent data from live.

I find Microsoft's Hyper-V easy to work with an certainly powerful enough for this type of scenario. I don't think it's quite as powerful as the high end VMware solutions, but I think they'd be overkill for this kind of thing, and it's free and built into Windows Server 2008.

1qTour

stevenmu wrote: »

It sounds like you really need virtualisation. Get servers with as much RAM as you can cram into them and CPUs that support hardware virtualisation, and use them to host virtual machines for the users to develop on. The users should then never touch to host server/OS, except maybe to start/stop VMs or provision new ones etc. All development, testing etc should take place within the virtual machines.

If you plan your VMs out well you can have different environments which may be needed held independantly. You can take copies/snapshots of them so if they end up in an unuseable state you can roll back to an earlier snapshot. You could also periodically take snapshots from live back to dev/test so that your dev/test environments have recent data from live.

I find Microsoft's Hyper-V easy to work with an certainly powerful enough for this type of scenario. I don't think it's quite as powerful as the high end VMware solutions, but I think they'd be overkill for this kind of thing, and it's free and built into Windows Server 2008.

Thanks for the reply stevenmu. I think i was a bit unclear in my original post. There will be 2-3 of us developing and rewriting what is on the current server but 3-400 end users of these systems that would be used heavily enough in business hours. I dont think there would be a need for VMs in that case?

I suppose the best way to put it is that our technology department are leaving us decide the full server setup and we are going to move to something a little more modern and structured. We will have a test server also so the new situation should be good enough.

I think the way it looks like now is PHP using a Zend Server. Any experience or knowledge regarding that?

I also noticed in the meantime that there was a servers and systems subforum which is where I initially should have posted this if you want to move it.

stevenmu

I don't really know anything about PHP/Zend, I'm more of a .Net guy, so I can't say anything specifically about that. I'd still think virtualisation could be of benefit particularly on the dev side of things, it would give flexibility in terms of experimenting with web server configurations, installing plugins etc. But there's no reason you can't go with a traditional style approach and experiment with virtual servers on the dev box to get a feel for the features it gives.

spoonface

1qTour wrote: »

Looking for a bit of advice/opinions here. We will be setting up a new server at work. It will be hosting various tools, applications and alot of reports, tabular and graphed, for end users.

The current server is a mess and hosts these tools which are written in classic asp w/vbscript to the most part.

These are all written by various users through out the years and some not coded too well. As a result of this and the fact the server is on its last legs the server is unstable and has alot of downtime. It was the test, pre-production & production server for developing all these! Not ideal.

For the new servers (getting a test one one too) we are thinking of going with a setup of either ASP.NET or PHP with a MySQL database. I have a little experience with PHP and ASP.NET and bar some googling done really know the benefits of each for these particular requirements. There are about 300+ users.

Just wondering from your experiences is this a good idea? Is there any other factors that should be taken into account? Also any error tracing software thats descriptive?

Any help appreciated, cheers.

I'd reccommend you stay away from buying any actual hardware and instead look at something like Amazon AWS instead. It's such a cost and hassle to have to keep your own hardware hosted, supported, replaced etc. By using cloud computing you will only have operational costs, not capital costs and you'll only pay for the capacity you're actually using so it makes a lot of sense.

Sposs

Yes agree with above, this is an ideal set-up to transfer to a cloud computing set-up but of course im abit bias