Windows Server 2003: CPU Affinity

[culex]

VMWare aside...

I'm looking for a solution to limit a bunch of Windows Services (bunch of server applications) not really for troubleshooting or performance issues but for licensing issues.

My goal is to have all the service processes that I specify be limited to one core and one core only.

I looked in to freeware utilities like THG Task Assignment Manager and Get and Set CPU Affinity... On paper, they seem to be doing what I'd like them to do.

One thing I'm not sure is how Windows Server 2003 loads services. The two programs I mentioned above are not technically Windows Services. I am guessing if those programs can be loaded FIRST before any Windows Services load up, then they would be doing their job of restricting my application services to one core.

THe reason I ask this is because the application services I'm trying to limit right now do not allow the affinity to be changed once the service has started. So I'm worried that even if I implement the freeware utilities, they would not be able to set the CPU affinity if the services were to be loaded first. Of course on any server maintenance reboot, I can login, disable some services, load the affinity program, then start the services again but that wouldn't be too conventional.

With that being said, am I thinking along the right lines that these may not work for what I want to do? Or is there a way to specifically load the affinity programs before the Windows Services are loaded?

 

[Nothinman]

I'm looking for a solution to limit a bunch of Windows Services (bunch of server applications) not really for troubleshooting or performance issues but for licensing issues.

So the people who wrote the software told you that even though you have X cores you can only pay for a license for Y cores if you set their affinity to them?

 

[culex]

In a nutshell, yeah.

Ripoff imo but I'm not the one that's dealing with that part. I just wanna get this figured out.

 

[Smilin]

I do not believe affinity will solve your problem but I'm not familiar with whatever detection scheme they are using.


You can use the "start" command with the "affinity" switch perhaps but that's really only available after boot. If it's a service you'll have to do some major monkeying.

If you're going to cripple it to a single processor anywhat you might as well use the /numproc switch in boot.ini to artificially limit the number of processors in the box.