I've heard about the FSMO role issue as well, just don't understand it. Simply having those roles (to me) doesn't compute the necessity of a physical box. Wish I understood the reasoning a bit better.
I too love the DR portion of it. It's one of the main reasons we're pushing hard for this to come faster. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 5:06 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: VMWare / Virtualization Lots of varied opinions on this subject... I (personally) will virtualize almost anything (SQL, Exchange, File/Print, etc.). The only things I shy away from virtualizing are the FMSO role DC, Oracle (because of their cpu pricing model), or other servers that are very cpu intense. Aside from that, I'm willing to virtualize most any box. I really like the added DR it provides me (we backup data/files on each server via Backup Exec (VM or physical) but in addition, we also backup the entire VM flat-file every night (basically an image backup of the server). Restoring the entire VM flat-file can be done in 20 minutes flat, whereas rebuilding a crashed server and restoring the data can take hours or more. Low overhead boxes are typically the best candidate to virtualize (IMO) but if you have a very robust virtual host, you can get away with virtualizing database servers, etc. as well. JR Original Message: ----------------- From: Fogarty Richard MR - CONTR - Team EITC [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:47:32 -0400 To: [email protected] Subject: VMWare / Virtualization When virtualizing a datacenter is there a stand fast rule on what one can/cannot virtualize? For example, we're not scheduled to upgrade to E2k7 for some time, so I'd like to virtualize our E2k3 boxes. We've used the capacity planner and very little of our existing infrastructure is being taxed. Our SQL boxes run with all of our DBs on a SAN with fiber channel (as do all of our Exchange stores) - so I'm assuming that most should be fine. I know I've heard some of you say that you'd never virtualize everything, so are DCs the only systems you'd leave on a physical box? (Mind you, this is outside the obvious systems where you'd get no ROI) Comments? Thanks in advance, Rick ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~ -------------------------------------------------------------------- myhosting.com - Premium MicrosoftR WindowsR and Linux web and application hosting - http://link.myhosting.com/myhosting ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~ ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~
