Sizing MySQL Database Servers for Drupal What are some guidelines to follow when it comes to sizing MySQL Servers? CPUs, RAM, Disk Space, Clock Speeds, etc?

We're going to go with either the community edition or the enterprise edition, and use it to run Drupal for a www and other top-level sites. OS is RHEL 6.x, on VMWare. We'll also probably run a caching tool, like memCache or Varnish. At the moment we are looking at two load balanced web servers that connect to one or more MySQL servers. There is talk of possibly using a master-slave or multi-master configuration. DB engine is going to be InnoDB.

We're looking at about 6000 pages of content to start, and grow quickly. Our normal throughput is about 40Mbps (observed over one hour), although we've seen it as high as 70Mbps occasionally. 

Thanks,

KM
I was waiting for more experienced people to answer, but one thing I will point out, since you're using innodb engine. You'll want sizeable amount of RAM to increase the innodb_buffer_pool_size so that it can hold your dataspace, if possible. So if your database takes up 6GB, it's feasible to set the buffer_pool_size to catch it in RAM (assuming you can address that much RAM...see below). But if the database takes up 64GB, it might be a stretch (at least for something like my small company's budget) to get a server with enough RAM.

You'll need to make sure your CPU architecture and OS is 64-bit. I ran into this recently, where an old xserve upgraded to Mac OSX 10.6 can't utilize >4GB of RAM per process. Probably not an issue with modern servers.