Windows 64-bit

Does FPMI/FSQL/MySQL support Windows XP 64-bit?

I am installing new servers, and the option is go to Windows 32-bit or take out 2GB of RAM.

Thanks,
Matt

Yes, our software will run on 64-bit Windows. We run in the 32-bit WoW mode, but it should work fine.

Carl,

I had to Wiki WoW, what a great source of ‘scholarly information,’ but it works. WoW sounds slow, like some sort of a layer of Windows to wade through. It sounds like going with 32-bit and dropping back to 4GB might be faster? if not less trouble. Any recommendations? This machine is a quad-core with 4 or 6GB RAM and 160GB drive.

Thanks,
Matt

This addresses running Win32 applications on top of Win64 if anyone is interested.

support.microsoft.com/kb/896456

I’m not sure that the fact the whole process “sounds slow” to you means you should change all of your plans… There are a good number of users using 64-bit Windows, and I’ve never heard anyone complain. So, unless you happen to be doing something way more complex, I wouldn’t worry about it too much and would go with the hardware that’s going to be more relevant for a greater amount of time… the 64-bit hardware.

Of course, at the end of the day, our software IS 32-bit, so if you’re buying the machine just for that, it may be cheaper to go that route.

Regards,

What are your requirements? Have you looked at our benchmarks?

If you have really beefy requirements on monster servers, I’d go with VMWare ESXi and take advantage of VMotion. That said, our system requirements aren’t that great, so you may have free resources yet. Also, if you have extra computing resources, my opinion is that you’ll get the most “bang for your buck” by separating the SQL database machine and host it on your most powerful machine - just make sure that you have a fast connection between your servers. It’s cheap these days to set up a dedicated switch gig-E network (VLAN or otherwise)

[quote=“nathan”]What are your requirements? Have you looked at our benchmarks?

If you have really beefy requirements on monster servers, I’d go with VMWare ESXi and take advantage of VMotion. That said, our system requirements aren’t that great, so you may have free resources yet. Also, if you have extra computing resources, my opinion is that you’ll get the most “bang for your buck” by separating the SQL database machine and host it on your most powerful machine - just make sure that you have a fast connection between your servers. It’s cheap these days to set up a dedicated switch gig-E network (VLAN or otherwise)[/quote]

Just to start this post off, you know way more about this stuff then I do Nathan.

Ok, to start things off, we are currently building a mini data cetner, with 6 servers. We have 2 machines dedicated to FPMI/FSQL/OPC, and 2 bigger machine running circular replicated MySQL(come on continuent, I need to cluster that. Should launch tommorow!!). We also have 2 machines running ESXi for various other server needs. That said, if ESXi was out 6 months ago, we would have only 2 beefy machines, as I am quite impressed with ESX/i. And if you have the money, Vmotion and storage Vmotion could be a life saver. However, to do this, you need some sort of SAN. We have a Dell MD3000i iSCSI SAN, and it is awesome. We bought it 6 months ago, and we have 6 750gb SATA drives and 4 300 Gb SAS drives. The SATA drives serve our DB (more spindles, although SAS is faster on spindle to spindle tests) and the SAS drives serve our ESXi machines. Now we are not live yet, but when I can get a copy, I will test xVM and let you know how it compares.

On a side note, I got an email today saying Sun xVM Server should be released in coming weeks.

Kyle - roughly how big are your projects (number, clients, tags, screens, etc)? Sounds like you’re throwing more serious hardware than most of our customers.

The SAN thing is a bit of a hurdle for (relatively) small installs, but pays off for itself quickly after that. I’m a big fan of EMC units - Dell has been rebranding them lately as well.

We are actually in the middle of setting up a hosting service actually. We have redundant server, switches, power, hard drives, etc. I am quite impressed with the MD3000i actually. We use it to hold our databases and virtual machines. We have it mostly set up now, just getting some marketing stuff ready and finalizing software, networking etc.

As for the SAN barrier, You could build a relatively cheap SAN with a low powered server, 3 or 4 1Tb hard drives, and a copy of freenas, openfiler, or pretty much any linux os that can run iscsi-target. You might have not be able to run as much IO through it as a dedicated SAN, but the failover would still be there and would still perform quite well