CompTIA® Server+ Exam Notes : Server Operating Systems

2. Server Administration

2.1 Server Operating systems

Performance baseline: Building a baseline of performance data is an important part of any Server management function. The baseline shows what performance is like under certain load conditions, when the server is known to be operating properly. The data can be used as a yardstick for measuring the impact of configuration changes or for capacity planning.

The most appropriate time for making baseline performance measurements is during the normal utilization of the server resources. This will reflect the normal load, and can be used for future reference. If the baseline performance statistics are taken during idle time or during backup time, it may not truly reflect the actual load on the server. Also, it is recommended to regularly monitor the performance and compare the same with baseline measurements, so that any trend can be detected at an early stage.

Note that, if baseline is taken without load (during weekend) then it will not correspond to the normal activity and is not much useful for later troubleshooting (when actual problem arises).

The most appropriate way to ensure that the newly installed servers are performing in expected lines is to make baseline performance measurements and compare with the known results taken on the other servers in the farm. However, the users also form an important constituent in identifying the bottlenecks. Sometimes, the problem may not have been identified early enough if we depend on user feedback for performance tuning.

File system Types:

FAT32: FAT32 is an older file system that's largely relegated to USB flash drives and other external drives. Windows uses NTFS for its system drive, and it's also ideal for other internal drives. ExFAT32 doesn't have any realistic file-size or partition-size limits. exFAT is a modern replacement for FAT32

exFAT32: It's a file system optimized for flash drives. It's designed to be a lightweight file system like FAT32 without all NTFS's extra features and overhead, but without FAT32's limitations. Works with all versions of Windows and modern versions of Mac OS X, but requires additional software on Linux.

NTFS: NTFS, an acronym that stands for New Technology File System, is a file system first introduced by Microsoft in 1993 with the release of Windows NT 3.1.

NTFS is the primary file system used in Microsoft's Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Windows NT operating systems.

The Windows Server line of operating systems also primarily use NTFS.

ReiserFS: ReiserFS is a general-purpose, journaled computer file system. ReiserFS is currently supported on Linux. The Reiser File System was the default file system in SUSE Linux distributions. Reiser FS was designed to remove the scalability and performance limitations that exist in EXT2 and EXT3 file systems.

Note: A journaling file system is a fault-resilient file system in which data integrity is ensured because updates to directories and bitmaps are constantly written to a serial log on disk before the original disk log is updated. In the event of a system failure, a full journaling filesystem ensures that the data on the disk has been restored to its pre-crash configuration.

UFS: The Unix file system (UFS; also called the Berkeley Fast File System, the BSD Fast File System or FFS) is a file system used by many Unix and Unix-like operating systems.

Virtual Machine File System (VMFS): VMFS is a scalable and high performance symmetric clustered file system for hosting virtual machines (VMs) on shared block storage.

ZFS(Zettabyte File System): ZFS is a local file system and logical volume manager created by Sun Microsystems Inc. for highly scalable storage. ZFS runs on Solaris, FreeBSD and Linux variants, and includes built-in data services and features such as replication, deduplication, compression, snapshots and data protection.

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