Server Set Up

[johnhendy]

Hi All,

Recently I have been successful in a bid to launch the SIMPLE Project at Stafford University Law School. The bid includes hardware and design. I have been given funding to set up a new server specifically for the project. However, after speaking to the Server Manager I am a little unsure on the size that we need (we roughly have about £4000 for the server/set-up/storage). Can anyone help give me a rough idea on the storage capacity that I would need (or any other technical ideas on the server)? We are looking to set this up and develop courses for the Law School (as soon as possible).

Once the Platform has been released and we have designed new courses, they will all be made free to the SIMPLE Community.

Many thanks for any advice

Best wishes

John

[mhughes2k]

Hi there,

Its quite difficult to plan server specs for SIMPLE, as there are a number of factors to consider such as file size of resources in simulation blueprint, number of simulation instances, amount of communication between player-roles.

In terms of "barebones" systems specification to run the SIMPLE platform we've previously suggested:
-Pentium 4
-1Gb RAM
-60Gb Hard Disk

I'm currently out of the office and back on Tuesday, but when I get back in I'll post some more accurate specs based on our server set up.

[johnhendy]

Many thanks Michael,

Any info is greatly appreciated

Best wishes

John

[mhughes2k]

Hi John,

Just as an example of the server configuration that we use (bearing in mind that this is for approximately 300 students in 74 groups each with 5 simulations each):

1x Xeon 2.80GHz (equivalent)
512mb RAM
10GB hard disk
(Processor is a Xeon equivalent as we use a VMWare ESX virtual server instead of physical machines)

Our SIMPLE database for this server at the end of the year was approximately 4.7GB, (of which 3.8GB represents documents generated as part of a simulation or by the students).

The total amount of space for simulation blueprints & project information which generated all of these documents was approximately 25mb.

Unfortunately I can't give you exact numbers, but basically the disk space required for a project is VERY roughly:

diskspaceForAllResourcesInAProject +( (diskspaceForAllResourcesInAProject * 2) * numberOfInstancesOfTheProject )

However the "2" is only a rough factor covering the disk space required for the copy of a resource delivered to a simulation instance AND any student response to it, and doesn't take in to account any files that the student generates on their own as part of the workload...

That said from the specs, you can see that even for a substantial number of projects a fairly reasonably provisioned machine should be able to cope.