Storage areas on a DC? Bad idea?

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At the moment all our storage areas including home directorys for about 300 users are stored on the DC server that hosts AD, DNS, DHCP and the printers.

I'm thinking about moving them across to another server over the holiday.

They currently sit on a s2k3 server, dual core xeon 3ghz, 2GB RAM, 300GB RAID 5. I have about 50GB of space left.

I have a spare (ish) server which is just hosting some light network applications. The server in question is a xeon 3ghz 2GB RAM 500GB RAID 1.

I'm wondering if I should up the RAM in each machine to 4GB, then upgrade the 2nd server to s2k8 and host all the user files on there away from my DC.

We're only a primary school so I dont think i need a SAN or SCSI drives. We have about 500 users (but some are class logins) with 150 XP clients. We plan to move to Windows 7 sometime in 2011 (probably the summer)

What do you think?
My other plan involves replacing the DC with a much beefier server with around 6-8GB RAM and server 2008...

 

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Whoa... wait... what? 'The' DC? Are you saying you only have one DC?

 

what zeb said

300 users on one server with no backup?

 

lol.. no sorry guys, i should have clarified that I have another DC but it holds a specific SQL database that I really cant mess with and the front end of the database wont support s2k8... yet..

AD is replicated across the 2 which seems to be working fine but all the home areas and user storage is on server1.

 

Are you saying that we are allowed more than one?

 

It's very common in primary schools, in fact I don't recall any that I supported over the years having multiple DC's. There simply wasn't the budget for it in most of them. (well that isn't strictly true, many had 2 DC's but they were on seperate networks and represented an Admin / Curiculum domain).

As for the orignal question, I'd probably add an extra server purely as a fileserver with a decent backup solution. (budget allowing)

 

Yeeeesh. One reason I'll never work in education! I'm reasonably adept at keeping things running on a shoestring, but only having one DC is just ridiculous - even with budgets being tight. No way I'd open myself up to that level of pain with anything more than 50 users. I'd even argue that, despite it going against all good practice and common sense to put SQL Server on a DC, Jamin is still in a better position with the situation that he's described, rather than only having one DC.

I'll do whatever I can to keep things running, but when nobody understands enough about technology to accept that you need a resilient infrastructure for 300-odd users, you can bet your arse that when the brown stuff hits the fan and you spend aeons trying to recoiver everything, it'll be you they blame, and your job that's on the line.

 

Firstly, you start by saying "we need another dc server for redundancy" over and over again, day in day out. Then when it fails, you switch to "i told you so, i told you so, i told you so, i told..." until the dc is fixed. Then switch it back over to "we need another dc server for redundancy"...

One of the sites i look after has a combined dc, file server and print server, never had any problems.

 

I just wouldn't bother. I've only had a couple of jobs which were small potatoes type affairs - both of them I asked what the infrastructure was like before accepting them and was told on one occasion that it was pretty good (it wasn't - I left after a week because of that and other (ahem) 'problems'), on the other I was told it needed overhauling and I would be given the budget to do it. I was - and duly sorted evertything out, then left a few months later when I'd finished it all. I don;t do whinging - and setting myself up for a job where I'd be doing nothing but moaning about the state of everything would be asking for trouble - I'd explode.

An acceptable level of risk I don't mind - I'm actually in the middle of re-designing our DR site, and going through the risk analysis stage at present, using a matrix based on likelihood of a disaster, and impact of particular systems being down. I've got a list of the systems I will be able to provide on our DR site, together with their costs to the business - then going to present for budget. Provided I've done my job properly, I can, with a clear conscience, turn round if something goes wrong in our main colo and tell the stakeholders that they had an opportunity to alleviate the risk but chose not to take it for financial reasons. That way I've done everything I can to mitigate the risk, and the business as a whole has taken the decision that the level of risk was acceptable prior to implementation.

However, when penny-pinching gets to the extreme of not even providing a reasonable base infrastrucutre let alone anything sat on top of that for applications, I'm just not willing to live with that level of unprofessionalism in an organisation.

Yet...

 

It's not as bad as it sounds to be honest. Most small schools have very simple setups when it comes to their servers. As long as there is a decent backup regime in place (and I made sure there was at the schools I supported) then it could be back up and running pretty quickly.

As an example, a typical setup for the admin server at a primary would be 10 or less users.

 

plus 13 weeks paid holiday