Moving out of Server 2008 SP2, which is a bit older than 2008 R2 SP1.
Main reason is to upgrade the physical server (yet to be done) so that we can use things such as NIC Teaming, Hyper-V Dynamic Memory and other stuff to increase density.
freitasm: I am planning on write a post on what we have used over the years. Would that be of interest?
Yeah it would actually , particularly any acceleration techniques used as I've seen sites with far less traffic needing multiple front end servers behind load balancers. Are you able to disclose the number of hits you got on each setup used?
Not historically, but I can tell you currently we serve about 230,000 pages a day, plus all resources for those pages (images, etc) out of a single VM running Windows Server/IIS/SQL Server - currently configured with 12 GB but in the previous OS version it was running with 16GB.
Those pages are about 40,000 - 50,000 user requests, around 30,000 bot requests, and 100,000 - 130,000 AJAX requests for live.geekzone.co.nz and the discussion box in the frontpage once you're logged in (each box is a separate script being loaded so it's a page in itself).
This is daily. Our CPU usage average is around 20%. Our SQL cache hit for various bits and pieces is 100%. We do use a CDN to distribute resources and optimize those using Riverbed Aptimizer. The physical machine is a HP DL360 with 24GB RAM, two NICs and ILO2.
I will write a detailed post later in my blog about previous configurations and current setup.
insane: ... I've seen sites with far less traffic needing multiple front end servers behind load balancers.
Considered it and reality is that we have no IO bottleneck at the moment. Average IO queue is 0.5 and currently it's not a problem. We do have different VHDs for each use case though - one for system, one for IIS, one for SQL, one for SQL log, one for backup.
Considering 100% cache hit ratio and SQL pages eviction tends to be zero, IO is not really a big deal at the moment.
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