Thanks for the link! I will inquire about virtual clustering, initially I was just thinking of hosting stand alone hosts...
From: Steven Peck [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 2:02 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: New to virtualization The others have given some good suggestions. Mine is download ESXi and play with it (And HyperV). Spend the time now because VMware is currently vey expensive and your environment sounds within the bounds of HyperV and if you find real savings there you can spend it doing some upgrades (AD, Exchange, Citrix) You can virtualize everything. It does complicate getting your environment back up if you have an unexpected outage (UPS dies, catches fire, repairs don't go well and you get a call at 2am regarding an unexpected outage but I digress). Even though it 'complicates' things, it's certainly still do-able. With VMware you just have to connect to your hosts individually until you get one with the DC on it and get it powered up before you bring everything else up. Having a physical DC is a nice to have as you can ensure it's powered up first and life is easier but it's not necessary, just really really nice. (One of our more isolated evironments as about 40 guests on 3 hosts and completely virtual including DCs with above referenced annoyances). If you go with VMware you are licensing both Microsoft and VMware per host and VMware has the fun new memory based price model. If you look at the costs you may find that just using HyperV then Windows Datacenter license may come out equal and grants you more flexibility regarding guest systems. System Center 2012 suite of products is coming out any day now so there is a lot of 'free training' offered via marketing (see some earlier threads). Are you looking at virtual clustering for uptime SLA's or were you just hosting stand alone hosts? http://systemcenteruniverse.com/Agenda <-- look at the SCVMM presentation. Just some thoguhts Steven Peck http://www.blkmtn.org On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 8:04 AM, David Mazzaccaro <[email protected]> wrote: Hi all, I am starting to investigate moving our aging network infrastructure into the virtual world. ~ 10 servers, 6-7 years old Windows 2003 domain Exchange 2003 Citrix 4.0 farm ~190 users After some initial discussions w/ a reseller, here's what they are recommending: (3) DL 380 G7 servers (to host the VMs) ~$18,000 (1) Net App FAS2240 (this is the SAN that would host 12 600GB drives of storage for the VMs) ~$20,000 VMWare essentials plus kit (VMware software) ~$5200 (3) MS Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise (this would allow the 3 HP servers to run 4 Windows 2008 VMs each) I guess the way it would work is that the VMs would reside on the SAN, and the 3 hosts would call up the SAN to load each VM utilizing the host's CPU, RAM, NIC, etc.)... right? I have meetings scheduled w/ 2 other vendors, but verbally both have started the conversation along the same path as above. Being very new to VM, does the above scenario seem to make sense? It is hard for me to imagine all that traffic going between the SAN and the host servers w/o creating a huge bottleneck (over gig Ethernet) Do people recommend virtualizing every server? Domain controllers? Exchange? Citrix farm (4 server)? Shouldn't something be left physical? Is 7 TB of storage enough (probably only 3 usable after array config)? Is the net app a decent appliance? $20k sounds cheap to me... I have done a little more reading, and from what I understand w/ 3 Windows Enterprise licenses, I would be limiting myself to 12 VMs. However, if I went w/ 3 Windows Datacenter licenses, for a small increase in price - I would get unlimited VMs? Which would allow for actually having a testing environment, and better patch deployment? Thx . ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin . ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
