Symantec Management Platform (Notification Server)

Sorry if this question has been asked.

I am setting up a brand new Altiris Server and I want to know the best way to partition my hard drive. I have read through the "Planning and implementation Guide" and they recommend that the hard drive be partitioned as a Raid 5 or 1+0. The problem I have with this is that the OS and the Altiris Application will be on the same partition. I don't like having the OS and Application on the same partitions.

This is what I was thinking:

Partition one: OS Partition Raid One
Partition Two: Altiris Partition Raid Five

Has anyone setup there Altiris server this way? Any recommendations would be great.

When designing your Notification server, it's best to think in terms of disk I/O.  High read/write queue times on your Notification Server and/or SQL Server are prime suspects when troubleshooting poor performance.  In addition to evaluating your RAID needs on each partition, you also need to take into consideration how much throughput is being passed through your controllers/channels.

Major players in the design include the OS, page file, Notification Server, and SQL Server if it is on-box.  Depending on how many solutions you are running and how many clients will be managed by your server, a wide range of options are open to you.  Depending on the size of your environment I'd initially recommend at least a two partition configuration - OS on C: as RAID 1, and the Application on D: as RAID 5 if SQL is off-box.

If you have a SAN, just build your box with only local disks (2x73GBs?) for the C: drive.  Allocate a fairly large LUN (maybe 100GB?) for the D: drive and this is where you will install Altiris.  Depending on your SAN you may be able to configure whatever sort of RAID config you want, or take the default.  If you'll be running the SQL server locally on-box (recommendation is to have a dedicated 64-bit SQL 2005 box), allocate several LUNs for drives E: ~ F: or so, and build your Altiris_CMDB database to span across those using multiple data files in the SQL configuration.  Finally, allocate a couple of 10GB LUNs for the DB transaction log and TempDB.

In any case, bgreen is right on; think in terms of I/O and disk contention.  When we built our first NS, we had a 36 GB RAID-1 mirror set for the OS, then a ~210GB (3x73GB)  3-disk RAID-5 with several partitions (D: for database, E: for transaction log, and F: for Altiris application).  We've been suffering with that for a long time, and recently moved the database onto the SAN which has helped tremendously.  Also don't forget to setup database maintenance jobs to defrag or rebuild indexes and update statistics on the database as these can help improve performance.

Perfect Thanks guys