New SQL Server.....

I have just goten in my gruby little hands a brand spanking new server to run SQL on. Im talking about a beast of a box with 8 processers and 16 gig of ram. Im loading SQL server enterprise on it and have been raised with a question. The server peps here, "it profesionals" seem to think that i need to keep 2 processors free for the os. from everything that i have read threw my studies of SQL i have seen that that is crap, that SQL will give the os its resources as it needs them. Any thoughts on this and or any Microsoft articles that prove your positions? Any help would be great here thanx
JimFirst have some respect and wash your hands!

Now... If this server is ONLY used for MSSQL server then reserving 2 processers for the OS is stupid. If you run allot of jobs or have software, other than MSQL stuff, running then reserve 1 processer AFTER seeing the remaining 7 running at 100% utilization 100% of the time. You can alter the cpu affinity at any time.

If you follow the recommendations I would be you would see the 2 OS cpus peg 100% about 0.000001% of the time and idle the remaining 99.999999% of the time!

I would ask the "professionals" to defend their point.|||Originally posted by Paul Young
First have some respect and wash your hands!

Now... If this server is ONLY used for MSSQL server then reserving 2 processers for the OS is stupid. If you run allot of jobs or have software, other than MSQL stuff, running then reserve 1 processer AFTER seeing the remaining 7 running at 100% utilization 100% of the time. You can alter the cpu affinity at any time.

If you follow the recommendations I would be you would see the 2 OS cpus peg 100% about 0.000001% of the time and idle the remaining 99.999999% of the time!

I would ask the "professionals" to defend their point.

Im with u on this one. When i set this thing up its gona go full throtel :)
thanx
any more feed back would also be nice
Regards Jim

New Setup Question

Hi there, a client asked me to make some recommendations as to the hardware setup for a new SQL 2000 setup. They will be importing a 9 gig sql 7 DB...

Specifically I'm looking for Optimal Raid configurations and Memory. Initially I was going to recommend a dual CPU machine with a raid 5 for the DAta, and rain 1 for the transaction logs. Is that still the recommended choice.

Also if they wanted to do a fail ever cluster I assume they are going to have to add an additional CPU license if the backup machine was a single CPU?Please provide more info about transactions nature. For high level of concurent transactions with high activity on writes RAID5 is not appropriate choise.