I probably sound like a broken record, but what requirements and constraints do you have?
E.g. I did a project to deploy something like this to ~600 branch sites. In that case, the SCCM, AD, File & Print and Wintel teams are all separate, so that was a key consideration in designing the end state. In your case, what are the key considerations? a) Who's supporing this infrastructure? (one team? or many?) And how is it supported? (onsite? remote, and if remote, is it relying on in-band or do you have out-of-band?) b) What's your software licensing model? c) What's the current track record of incidents for your servers? Do you often have the print queues or file shares causing issues? Do you have a lot of hardware failures? As others have pointed out, virtualising does have benefits. But given the workloads, unless you have hardware failure, I don't particularly see restoring an RODC or backing up a file server (assuming you have access to some kind of replication technology) particularly hard. Virtualisation also has overheads - managing more software instances, potentially juggling storage etc Cheers Ken ________________________________________ From: Tim Vander Kooi [[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2013 4:23 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Servers in remote locations I have got a number of servers at remote locations which are currently serving as RODC and file and print servers. It is time to upgrade the hardware that they are running on and I am curious with hypervisors and the technology of today if people think it is of value to replace the existing servers with servers running 2 separate virtual servers: 1 RODC, DNS, DHCP, and 1 file & print; or would you run it all as one physical server with all roles installed? The existing servers are 2008R2 and the new ones will be 2012. Ideas? ~ 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
