Once again, Microsoft has upped the ante on system requirements. Let’s see what you’ll need, minimum, to build a system with decent performance.
CPU Needs
While you can get Server 2003 running on something as slow as a 266MHz system, I strongly recommend at least a 1GHz system. Of course, 2GHz would be better, as would multiple processors. But one gig will do, provided you have lots of RAM. Which brings me to…
RAM Requirements
We tend to think of CPUs as determining a system’s speed, but as has always been the case for the NT family, having enough RAM to give the OS a lot of elbow room is every bit as important in ensuring snappy performance in a server.
But how much memory should you have? That’s a tough question because it depends on what you want to do with the server: a simple file and print server might run just fine with 256MB of RAM, where a system running SQL Server, Exchange, IIS, and the like probably needs at least a couple of gigabytes of RAM to run well. But even though it’s impossible for me to tell you a priori how much RAM you’ll need, let me offer this advice: put at least a gigabyte of RAM on any Windows Server 2003 that you build, more if you can. If you turn your server on and the lights don’t dim, then you haven’t put enough RAM in the system! (Just kidding…)
More memory means more places for the memory hardware to fail, however, and that’s why you need error-correcting code or ECC memory. You may recall something called parity, a set of circuits attached to memory systems of PCs in the ‘80s whose job was to monitor the memory and detect data loss in a PC’s RAM. Such data loss could be caused by a bad memory chip, and you can find bad chips by testing your RAM with a good RAM tester program like CheckIt or QAPlus before deploying the server. But even perfect RAM chips can fall prey to random events that cause data loss; static electricity, power surges, and, believe it or not, infrequent extremely low-level radioactivity from the memory chips themselves can damage memory data. (Don’t worry, you won’t get cancer or muta- tions from your memory chips. Many, many everyday things in our world are mildly radioactive: the bricks cladding your house and, indeed, most kinds of ceramic produce an extremely small amount of radioactivity. Memory chips produce a radioactive particle once in a great while, and when they do, that particle may happen to cross paths with a location in memory—and when that happens, the memory bit may be flipped from a 0 to a 1 or vice versa.)
In any case, parity was kind of frustrating in that it could detect that something was wrong, but it didn’t know what was wrong. PCs with parity memory were usually designed to simply shut down the PC when a memory error was detected using the parity method (which the error message would usually incorrectly call “a parity error” rather than a “memory error”—after all, if parity detected the memory error, then parity was working fine!), and shutting down an entire system just because parity discovered one damaged bit is a trifle extreme.
PLANNING AND PREPARATION 97
In contrast, most modern Pentium II-and-later–based systems (which, again, include the Xeon, Celeron, and of course the Pentium III and 4) can go a step further and implement ECC. ECC is cool because it not only detects memory errors, it corrects them automatically. So when that stray alpha particle or (more likely) power glitch scrambles a bit, ECC finds that problem and fixes it without ever bothering you.
Now you may be wondering, “How much would such a wonderful feature cost?” Well, back in the old days, I worked on minicomputer systems with ECC that cost thousands of dollars. But most Pentium II–based systems can do it for about $20 per 128MB of RAM. Here’s the trick: most PC memories these days are implemented as synchronous dynamic random access memory, or SDRAM, packages. SDRAMs come in a 64-bit version or a 72-bit version. The difference in price between ECC and non-ECC RAM is small—about $25 on a gigabyte of RAM, when last I checked. That’s a pretty good price for a “data insurance policy.”
Tip Recently I’ve noticed that people selling RAM don’t label it as “64-bit” or “72-bit”; rather, they’ve taken to calling
all memory modules “64-bit” and then adding the phrase “w/ECC” or the like. If you’re in doubt about what you’re buying, insist that a phrase like “with enabled ECC memory” or something similar be in the invoice. And yes, you have to insist on that. I flatly cannot understand why anyone sells any PC system nowadays without ECC, but the majority of systems are still without the benefit of ECC.
You may have to go into your system’s setup BIOS in order to turn on the ECC feature. Not all systems activate ECC by default.
Storage Requirements
A basic bare-bones installation of Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition chews up about 1.5GB of space on a hard disk. Of course, you’ll want to put things on the disk other than the OS, so you’ll need more than that—how much more is up to you based on what you want to do with the server. But if you’re just planning on building a system to play around with to get to know the OS better, I found a 4GB C: drive to be about the right size.
Server 2003 brings some terrific news about inexpensive EIDE drives in that they are now treated asynchronously. Here’s what that means in English: throughout computing history, it’s often made better sense to buy a bunch of smaller drives instead of one large drive. That’s because each hard disk has its own independent set of read/write heads. More than one drive means more than one set of read/write heads, which means that it’s easier for the computer software to do more than one thing at a time. For example, you could often speed up an NT server by spreading its paging file across several separate physical hard disks.
Unfortunately, that advice only worked with SCSI drives. The driver for EIDE drives, atapi.sys, couldn’t “juggle”—if you told it to simultaneously work with two or more EIDE drives, it would instead just alternate between the drives. Whatever software you were running would work fine; it would just run more slowly than it would if the EIDE driver could juggle.
With Server 2003, that changes, and the atapi.sys driver is more facile. EIDE drives can run simul- taneously, so long as they are on different EIDE channels. That’s not to say that I don’t recommend SCSI drives for servers—they’re almost always a better answer than EIDE—but for those on a severe budget, EIDE drives now look like an okay idea, where in earlier versions of Server, EIDE drives were a terrible idea.
98 CHAPTER 5 SETTING UP AND ROLLING OUT WINDOWS SERVER 2003
A bootable CD-ROM drive, although not required, is always highly recommended. A time always comes when your server crashes and you need a reinstall fast. Rather than scrambling for boot disks to get you connected to your installation source on the network, you simply pop the CD in and off you go.
A network-bootable system—one that supports the Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) standard, version 0.99C or later—would be a real plus. This lets you set up a computer to boot from the network. You’ll like having this feature because it makes installing Server (or XP, for that matter) from a central RIS server much easier.
All of your hardware requirements can be further summed up by referencing the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL). Every piece of hardware in your system should be on the list. Anything not on the list could generate problems from application failures to system crashes and probably won’t even install at all. Why? Most likely, if your hardware is not on the list, you will have a hard time locating a driver. Should you happen to have an OEM driver that came with the hardware, you are risking system insta- bility because Microsoft hasn’t tested or guaranteed it to work. Why do you care? Because if you get on the phone to Microsoft and give them the requisite $245 in order to get them to help you with a problem, and then you tell them that you’ve got hardware that’s not on the HCL, the Microsoft support person gets to say, “Golly, I’m sorry, your stuff isn’t on the HCL, that’s the problem,” and hang up. Result: a free quarter kilobuck for Bill and no solution for you. If you trust the manufacturer of the hardware who provided the driver to have fully tested it with all aspects of Server 2003, fine. Be cautious, though. The best recommendation is that if you are buying new hardware, consult the list first. You can find the HCL on your Server CD (\Support\HCL.txt) or on the Web at ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/services/whql/HCL/.