Anyone need some RAM ;)

[Gilligan]

Inkbrigade... you will appreciate this!

That label is for EACH pack.

[blue moon]

<drooling>
Kingston makes good stuff! We used to buy defective RAM for pennies and then send it to Kingston for replacement (lifetime warranty). 'made good money with it, too.

pierre

[Gilligan]

Yeah, I have a small stock pile of defective Corsair ram with the intention of doing that one day. LOL

Sadly this RAM still isn't installed.  Something isn't right.  He ordered something wrong.

The server is a tripple channel dual CPU server.  So there are 2 CPU's with 9 Slots each, 3 banks of 3.  I have 9 sticks of ram here and 6 installed in it now (2 gig sticks).

I honestly think this guy made a $2k mistake and ordered WAY too much ram.  We don't need 144 gigs of ram in that server, plus it won't fit in this configuration.  96gigs would fit but that still seems overkill for this server. *shrug*

[GraphicDisorder]

Finally an acceptable amount of Ram 

24gb in my rig, 32 in my designers rig.    lol

[Gilligan]

Let me know when you get to 144.

[GraphicDisorder]

Let me know when you get to 144.

LOL

[Sbrem]

I dunno, I liked the MacPlus with 1 meg of RAM, you got to take naps and/or lunch breaks between keystrokes


Steve

[Dottonedan]

Yea, but that Mac will be running after a lightning storm and 10 years later.  Just say'n. 

[inkman996]

Learn something new every day. I never thought servers even needed RAM. Seems they are nothing more than networked mass storage and the PC station is where the RAM is needed.

[GraphicDisorder]

Learn something new every day. I never thought servers even needed RAM. Seems they are nothing more than networked mass storage and the PC station is where the RAM is needed.

Depends on what the server is doing really.

[Gilligan]

Obviously it needs some amount of ram... but in general a basic NAS (Network Attached Storage) would need minimal ram.

But today's servers are FAR from that.  They run SQL Databases, Domain Controllers with Active Directory or some other LDAP system (this is basically a large data base of users and computers and ALL their associated information, like phone numbers email addresses their log on credentials), Web Servers obviously, then you get into VM server (virtual machines)... ones that basically run nothing as an "OS" but have VM's hosted on them not unlike your Fusion.  This of course needs MASSIVE amounts of RAM depending on the system/users/applications.

Each VM is given a slice of RAM to use as it's own "real" RAM.  So if you give your virtual environment 4 gigs of ram then that is 4 gigs gone from the server.  As you can imagine that can get eaten up VERY fast.

Lots of people will just pile a bunch of VM's on one physical server... I think our Houston office has once with like over 100 VM's running on it.  Pretty insane stuff.  People will have a VM for Exchange, a VM for AD, a VM for DNS, a VM for their SQL blah blah blah.  All on one machine.  That is why these things need so much RAM.  This machine maxes out at 384gigs of RAM.

But for us, other than a secondary DC, maybe some DNS or DHCP... it's probably just a glorified NAS.  No major applications or virtual users are logging in to this machine.  So really 48 gigs would have been PLENTY.

[inkman996]

Good info Kevin I like learning these things even if it will never be practical for me lol.

My stupidity shows i figured the servers processors simply used their cache for the minimal computing required and all the actual computing was done at the stations.


When you say each VM is allotted x amount of RAM is that permanent wether that VM is active or not or is the Server smart enough to dole it out where needed?

[Gilligan]

I'd have to look into it more but I think as long as that VM is active and RUNNING, it is using that memory.  I know with HD space they can grow dynamically if you need them to (one of mine does).

If you think back to the older days and remember Autozone (or Autoshack if you go back far enough) they had those green monitors with text type interface that would burn into to the monitor since it never changed (hence the invention of the "screen saver" later).  Those were "dummy terminals" and they actually had almost NO horse power and everything actually took place at the server.

Then PC hard ware got stupid cheap and we were able to get everyone their own workstation.

Now it's gotten so powerful and cheap that it's actually starting to go back to the other way and a lot of people are moving towards a "dummy terminal" type of interface again.  Very small "thin clients" as they are called will boot off their network card and have instructions to go to a server to get booted and running.  You might have seen a system try to boot of the Network card before... looked like this but didn't actually populate any numbers because it didn't find anything.



Basically that is how a system like that would take off.

Then poof you got a virtual system like your fusion up and running and you really don't even know.

This allows for easy company wide upgrades to hardware and software when needing to manage hundreds-thousands of users.

The 144gigs of RAM that I have cost about $2k... that's the price of a couple of good workstations.  Yet it could provide RAM for 30 virtual systems essentially.  When you are just running some email, excel and word or some proprietary applications that is probably running off of a VM anyway (AP systems for instance).  Then you don't need a monster computer like essentially any system is these days.

Most office people can get by on a $400 PC, but that $400 PC is usually garbage and riddle with cut corners and other short comings that will bite you in the end.  Going with a virtual environment gives you the ability to have top notch hardware for even cheaper per client actually.