Howdy. I was in a very similar situation about a year ago. Virtualized about a dozen Windows servers. Decided to go w/ 3 host servers and an iSCSI SAN from NetApp with 24 drives. Couldn't be happier.
During the initial phase, I found Dell's DPACK tool to be very helpful. It is free (unlike my experience w/ VMWare's capacity planner - which I had several resellers offer to run for a fee). You download and run Dell's tool on your servers for several days (or longer if you have monthly spikes in activity) You do have to send the results to Dell, but they will in turn provide a very detailed report (CPU/RAM/LAN/IOPS/Etc.) to get you in the right direction. Good luck! Feel free to hit me up if you have any other questions. From: itli...@imcu.com [mailto:itli...@imcu.com] Sent: Friday, April 26, 2013 8:19 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Virtualization Looks like I am taking 13 physical Windows 2008/2003 servers and virtualizing them. Also one of the servers has 4 apps they would like to split off into 4 additional servers. Would like to be able to have them all work in a DR state if needed as well. So I will be buying 2 of these physical servers one for production and one for DR. I am looking at the HP tool and I need to get AverageCPU Util % Average Memory Used MB Average Disk IOPS Trans Average Disk Throughput MBps Average Network Throughput MBps Looking at Perfmon I don't see these exact settings. I do see: Processor\% Processor Time Memory\Availabe Mbytes PhysicalDisk\Avg Disk Sec/Read PhysicalDisk\Avg Dis k Sec/Transfer Network Interface\Bytes Total/Sec Am I on the right track? I am looking more at HyperV. But really, I don't have any clue. From: James Rankin [mailto:kz2...@googlemail.com] Posted At: Friday, April 26, 2013 7:45 AM Posted To: itli...@imcu.com<mailto:itli...@imcu.com> Conversation: Virtualization Subject: Re: Virtualization I wouldn't particularly say any hypervisor would be your best bet with this little info to go on.... For instance XenServer might make sense if you were running XenApp or XenDesktop VMWare is often the choice for "production" environments given the features it has and the product maturity, but I am sure its competitors are now catching up. However if it's a sandbox environment then one of the cheaper or free alternatives will do fine There are a vast amount of licensing considerations in the mix too... Are you looking to P2V existing servers or create new ones? Are you hosting sessions on these servers (i.e. RDS or Citrix), or are they just app servers? The use you make of the servers will dictate the sizing and performance you require The SAN question is a whole other kettle of fish, and one that has often started some interesting flame wars on this list :-) I think maybe a bit more info would help us guide you a bit better. Cheers, JR On 26 April 2013 12:10, itli...@imcu.com<mailto:itli...@imcu.com> <itli...@imcu.com<mailto:itli...@imcu.com>> wrote: Looking to virtualize 7 windows 2008 servers. A couple of questions: How do I size a Virtualized server and san? Which virtual server software is best? Hyper V, VMware, citrix???? Any guidance in this area is appreciated... ~ 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 listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com<mailto:listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin -- James Rankin Technical Consultant (ACA, CCA, MCTS) http://appsensebigot.blogspot.co.uk<http://appsensebigot.blogspot.co.uk/> ~ 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 listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com<mailto:listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com> 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 listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com<mailto:listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com> 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 listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
