Multi-purpose servers..discussion

One thing I learned the hard way is that if you want to install Oracle DB Server. Then simply don't install any other server with it. May be IIS or apache is OK but not more. Oracle process takes 100Mb minimum of memory (can be much more) and is CPU hungry. HD access is frequent. The machine takes ages to restart. I know that this depends on your specs but I think it's still relatively heavy. Besides, the versions I used does not have a proper uninstaller. If the uninstaller fails you'll be stuck with a heavily loaded machine that has all your other servers with it and now you'll need to back up all of those just to format the server to get rid of Oracle.

Come on guys, i'm sure most of you faced problems and hard times with incompatibility and installation issues..Just post it here so all of us benefit from your experiment

We built a 'business in a box'; one physical Windows 2000 server hosting AD, DNS, DHCP and file and print. It works fine, although the common-sense drawbacks of such an approach apply (the thing is non-critical and very lightly loaded)

It makes sense to install Websense, ISA, and AV on the same server, but consider Untangle ( untangle.com/ ) and let me know what you think ;-)

While having a 'security' server seems to be nice... you have a single point of failure for all of your security servers... not nice in my book.


Given three servers, after a bit of shuffling I came up with the following setup.
Server1: AD, DC, DNS, Printer

Server2: DC, Websense, Application

Server3: AV, ISA, File

I placed a DC on server1 and 2 for redundancy (it wouldn't be a bad idea to stack AD on server 2 as well). Altogether, AD, DC, and DNS are a pretty light load; throw printing on there and unless you are doing a ton of printing you shouldn't notice much of an increase from that. Altogether this gives you a pretty stable environment on your critical resources.

On Server2 you are getting DC backup (as mentioned before), while loading it down a bit with both application services and websense, but assuming you are running backups, I wouldn't be too worried.

For Server3, while you are placing both ISA and AV on the same server to my dismay (SPOF), I didn't think it would be worthwhile to place one of these on server 2 for processing reasons or on server 1 for stability... with just 3 servers you have to take a hit somewhere. Tossing the file server on here wouldn't take up too many resources away from your security apps...

I think this would be one of the better configurations given the restraints. If we are expounding on the subject and considering more of a best practices approach, I believe we could come up with a much better scenario...