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I work for my company's ECM group and my manager is considering pushing to upgrade the server infrastructure due to an increasing user community. Currently it's a single VM that has 2 cores and 4 gigs of ram running Windows Server 2008 (May upgrade to 2012 next year)

There are 2 options that's he's considering; either increasing the core count or increasing the memory. In the end we would have either 2 vm's with 4 cores and 8 gigs each or 4 vm's with 4 cores and 4 gigs each. Either scenario will end up in an F5 load-balancer.

Is it better to have fewer vm's with more memory per vm or more vm's with less memory?

Additional Information: The software package that we are using is a 64-bit web server & app server on a single vm. I'm not sure if this is enough info. I can provide more if needed.

Thank you for any insight provided!

jay1_z
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  • The only really accurate answer is "Test it for your exact scenario, then you'll know the answer", but I suspect the reason you're asking here is to try to avoid that. – Rob Moir Oct 16 '14 at 20:26
  • The thing is, I know that whatever option we choose we'll get an increase in performance. But the increase of, say, option 1 over option 2 may not be noticeable. This question is more for future-proofing, I guess. – jay1_z Oct 16 '14 at 20:34
  • Go with whatever way your manager is leaning towards...nothing is future proof and if it doesn't work out long term your manager won't be able to say "should've gone with what I was leaning towards." – TheCleaner Oct 16 '14 at 21:14
  • Don't do either of these until you've actually identified a performance bottleneck. You made no mention of having done this. – Michael Hampton Oct 16 '14 at 23:02

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This is entirely dependent on how the applications you're running behave. Some might require more CPU power, some might require more RAM. Some apps are also unable to use multiple cores effectively, which means scaling them horizontally (i.e. lots of smaller VMs running the same app) might be necessary. Without knowing more about your application there is no way to answer this. I would suggest using a tool like perfmon to understand better about what the application 's bottlenecks might be.

theterribletrivium
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