All depends on the infrastructure and your needs. Virtualisation certainly gives you the opportunity to spread your services out by putting them across multiple individual servers, but then you get that inevitable "Virtual Sprawl" as your server estate bloats out, using up more storage, more resources, more power - particularly when you start upgrading to 2008 R2 as we are. We've tried to consolidate a little - moving DHCP and DNS back onto the domain controllers, marrying up various image servers, consolidating various minor Citrix roles together (Single Sign-On, web interface services, metric servers and data collectors). I feel a lot happier now we have a bit more space available on the SANs for test environments.
I still try to group services together that don't really have too much impact if a restart is required, and I try to keep the "big hitter" systems as separate as possible.....YMMV On 19 July 2010 14:54, Holstrom, Don <[email protected]> wrote: > I only have a hundred users. Been doing this for about 12 years. I always > thought it was better to have more or less one major server per service. > That way, if one of our services came down or needed work, I wouldn’t be > taking down the entire system. I have a buddy with fewer users than me and > he has 20+ servers. Some in the air (virtual), some on the ground. I have > seven servers running. Both of us host our web services at an outside firm. > Both of us use Exchange. An outside firm says we should go with only a > couple of servers. That sure would make things easier, but… > > > > > > -- "On two occasions...I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
