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Our company plan to implement XenApp or 2X Application Server in the near future for 30 users using Microsoft Office 2010 Standard, but I have no idea on how to plan the hardware as a host for that configuration, is there anyone here can give me a hint on hardware configuration needed for that purpose f.e processor and memory resources needed

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What I would advise is that you use existing tools to estimate the average resource utilisation required for a single user - i.e. min/avg/max CPU, memory and disk/network IO.

Then take this average, multiply it by the current or expected user base, add around 20-40% to account for peak time concurrency (08:30-09:30am and 11:45-13:15pm peaks) then add in another 20-25% for the actual virtualisation overhead and you'll have a series of numbers.

These will be overall Mhz required, max memory required and disk/network IO requirements.

You'll then be able to choose a server with one or more multi-core CPUs (if you can leave yourself space to grow), that can take today what memory you need and also allow for anywhere between 50 and 100% growth over time and has a stable disk controller or SAN capable of creating a RAID 1 or 10 array that'll deliver the throughput you need.

Lastly, and I doubt this will be too much in your case, a network that'll do what you need (I'd imagine a pair of teamed 1Gbps NICs will do all you need).

Then look at your budget and service-availabilty requirements, if you're very techie then you might want to look at supermicro to build your own box, if not just play it safe and buy a HP/IBM/Dell box in whatever form-factor (pizza-box, tower, blade etc.) you want and feel free to come back here to check its specs then.

If I had to put my finger in the air I'd buy a HP DL380 G7 with dual E5640 Xeon CPUs, 12 or 24 GB of memory and 4 x 15k SAS disks - that'll do the job :)

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  • From your experience,how if We use SATA instead of SAS,is there any significant impact to the performance?
    – jakarta512
    Oct 9, 2010 at 16:09
  • SAS disks maintain a higher level of responsiveness under load, basically they don't drop off their performance as quickly plus they often deal with multiple concurrent requests better. The most important factor though is that they're generally designed for a longer 'duty cycle' - i.e. they can work for more hours per day, SATA often only have an 8hr duty cycle and will fail more often if pushed further than this. Hope this helps.
    – Chopper3
    Oct 9, 2010 at 16:28

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