Windows 2000 Performance Guide

Partitioning Multiprocessors

Beyond controlling multithreaded applications, another important tuning option for system administrators is partitioning large-scale multiprocessors to handle heterogeneous workloads. As we have seen, Windows 2000 shared-memory multiprocessors face serious scalability hurdles. As more processing engines are added to the system, the efficiency of the overall system diminishes due to the overhead of maintaining cache coherence and contention for the shared-memory bus. As we suggested at the outset, it makes sense to run Windows 2000 systems as dedicated application servers for a number of reasons, including some of the scalability and performance issues discussed in this chapter. But most shops would prefer not to have to maintain quite so many machines. For ease of administration, it is certainly advantageous to consolidate Active Directory and Domain controllers with machines performing file and print services so that each new redirected filesystem request does not require authentication from an entirely different machine on the network. Running messaging applications like MS Exchange or Lotus Notes on a few large-scale machines may result in reduced administration costs and less complex replication processing to manage. Partitioning offers a way to carve up large-scale multiprocessors into two or more logical machines that can be managed more efficiently than an undifferentiated n-way server machine.

Partitioning is accomplished in Windows 2000 ...