On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 4:03 PM, Jeff Kennedy <jkennedy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Is anyone running Dynamic NAV (Microsoft Business Solutions-NAVISION) on
there iSeries, using an IXA or iSCSI attached X-server ?
No, both i have extensive experience in sizing Microsoft SQL Server
systems, which Nav runs on. This may or may not help you.
Either way, this thread may probably more suited for the pctech list.
The current complaint is the software doesn't run well on Raid 5 DASD.
Well, the preferred storage for SQL Server is RAID10 for the data
files ("Physical Files") and RAID10 for the transaction log
("Journals"). Especially if you do not seperate data and transaction
logs onto seperate LUNs, you can easily run into performance problems.
Using RAID5 for storing the transaction log will run into write
contention FAST. RAID5 for the data files can be acceptable if there
is a very high read:write ratio.
So it's not necessarely wrong, it just depends on how you sized the storage.
In general, a SQL Server deployment needs at least three LUNs. One for
the OS, one for Transaction Log and one for the Data Files. RAID1,
RAID10, RAID5/10, respectively. Of course, for very small deployments
(2-5 users), you can run everything on the same spindles.
We are using an IXA with a X346, 3 GHz Zeon with 6 GIG Memory.
Whenever you have a performance problem on any system, you usually
don't start with taking stabs in the dark "it must the be iSeries",
"it must be the RAID5".
Instead, you measure the important values, and then look at the hard
facts and find the bottleneck, and then fix it.
Windows has perfmon, a very nice tool that can provide you with all
the information you need. However, interpreting that data requires
experience. I would suggest you to hire a neutral consultant with
Windows/SQL Server expertise, and have him gather metrics on where the
performance problem is.
The most likely bottlenecks are the storage backend (in your case, the
IBM i), or the application itself.
midrange.com
