best location for home folders

Question

best location for home folders

setting up a new server - with about 150 home folders - and say a maximum of 30 concurrent users:

Does it help to distribute the home folders across 3 or 4 drives?

Will it be faster with external Thunderbolt drives?

Posted on Mar 28, 2015 6:14 AM

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Answer 1

Mar 28, 2015 7:45 AM in response to jeremy bloomfield

Generally yes and yes. The faster the drive(s) the better. Try to predict load to distribute across storage or even servers. Watch for hitting the IOPS wall on your storage if you are dealing with a lot of small files. This has been trouble in a few locations.

But more important than the drive is your connection to the network. Do the simple math. Let's assume you have 1000Base connection and you are supporting wireless clients. The wireless is N and you are able to get about 50Base a connection. This is aggregated into your base stations and the base stations connect at 1000Base to the network. You will likely have multiple points of access. 30 concurrent users are getting the full through put (beginning of session, saves, and end of session) would be 1500Base exceeding the capacity of your access point if all 30 are on the same station.

Now consider the impact if these are wired devices. The more bandwidth you give the server the more requests it can handle as log as the disk array can keep up.

Give your server the fastest network connection you can. Consider bonding to get to 2000Base as that is inexpensive (assuming you have good switches already) and easy to implement. 10GigE is also available but if you don't have the switches already this can be pricey fast.

Be aware of folder redirection (there are some great resources in this forum on how to implement) and also understand the apps that will be used. Not all apps are network home friendly.

Reid

Apple Consultants Network

Author "Yosemite Server – Foundation Services" :: Exclusively available in Apple's iBooks Store

Author "Mavericks Server – Foundation Services" :: Exclusively available in Apple's iBooks Store

Author "Mavericks Server – Control and Collaboration" :: Exclusively available in Apple's iBooks Store

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Answer 2

Mar 29, 2015 11:14 AM in response to Strontium90

So it is either a MacPro with thunderbolt drives and a bonded gigabit ethernet pair-

Or a Sonnet XMac with daisy-chained thunderbolt drives, an ethernet PCI card bonded pair (which would also used Thunderbolt ... is it that good?

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Answer 3

Mar 31, 2015 5:25 AM in response to jeremy bloomfield

Depends on your needs and budget. A Mac mini with a USB3 or Thunderbolt to GigE also works well. My feeling is that a Mac Pro is really a workstation and using it for server duties is overkill (unless you have high CPU intensive tasks on the server).

And yes, the Sonnet devices allow for PCI card expansion, including 10GigE. Works well but there is a higher cost here.

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