Greetings – I’m a sysadmin tasked with spec’ing a replacement server to support Microvellum (amongst other roles). I have reviewed the “Microvellum Server System Requirements” document at https://community.microvellum.com/portal/en/kb/articles/microvellum-server-system-requirements .

The office has ~20 Windows workstations on a Windows domain. Of those, there are usually 3, and up to 5 concurrent MV users. MV users report the current database size is ~7.5 GB, on a SQL Server Express instance.

The current server is Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials, running bare-metal on a Dell T110 II server. There are some significant issues with it:

My initial thinking is to get a new server with more powerful hardware (especially disk). This would run Microsoft Hyper-V (or some other virtualization platform). On top of that a couple of virtual machines (VMs) would be configured:

This would accommodate the requirement for the DC and MV’s SQL Server instance to be on separate “computers” (VMs).

I’d like to get some feedback:

1. Windows Licensing: this could be achieved conventionally by purchasing one license of Windows Server 2022 Standard plus Windows Client Access Licenses (CALs). However, since the number of domain devices is relatively low, a lower-cost approach might be for VM1 to be Server 2019 Essentials (2022 Essentials is OEM-only at this time), and for VM2 to be Windows 11 Pro (on which SQL Server is fully supported). It should be noted that both VMs would be running on server-grade hardware with RAID, regular backups etc. Are there any gotchas with this latter scenario such as the Microvellum installer refusing to install the SQL database components on a Windows 11 computer (i.e. requiring and checking for a Windows Server OS)?
   
2. Disk Subsystem “Requirements”: These are outlined at https://community.microvellum.com/portal/en/kb/articles/microvellum-server-system-requirements#Storage . Depending on database size, MV can be supported by either SQL Server Express or SQL Server Standard. In this particular case we’re not opposed to upgrading to Standard but it should be noted that environments that can use Express can be supported by less disk hardware. Since we’re already looking at multiple VMs on one physical server we’ll probably start with a RAID10 array (minimum 4 drives) as recommended. However, to follow “best practices” and put various SQL Server components on separate physical drives requires separate arrays. If each extra array is RAID1 (2 drives) then following all “best practices” would require 6 additional drives (total 10 drives in server) and if each one is RAID10 (4 drives) then an extra 12 drives (total 16 drives in server). This sort of configuration is usually reserved for mission-critical enterprise environments with heavy OLTP or data warehousing needs. This is expensive at current enterprise SSD prices
   
3. We’re considering upgrading from 1 gig wired Ethernet to 2.5 or 10 gig, at least for the MV users. If anyone can share experiences with this, I’d like to hear about them

Anything else you’d like to share would be appreciated.