My feeling is that the decision should be made on an individual basis. I don't think I'd make a blanket statement that "more servers" or "less servers" is best. In a small business fewer might be better; in a high-availability business with a decent IT budget, more might be better, just as examples. As an IT pro, part of my job is to evaluate the business and determine the sweet spot for server implementation. For me, risk management is a big factor. What is the business' risk tolerance?
VMWare/VS has made a big difference in server volumes, at least physically. But required availability still rules on deployment considerations. There's still a single point of hardware failure, so consolidating DCs/DHCP/file/print/etc isn't much different whether it's virtual or physical. Vmotion etc can mitigate that if you want to spend the money. My personal opinion is that utilizing VMWare and putting multiple service servers on one host is better than buying a bunch of servers. You just have to plan your availability properly. Consider two VM hosts, with a copy of the service server on each. Not much different from having a pair of DCs or whatever. Then there's clustering or DFS or mirroring. Lots of options/choices. It's up to us to figure out the right ones for each situation... *********************** Charlie Kaiser [email protected] Kingman, AZ *********************** > -----Original Message----- > From: Holstrom, Don [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Monday, July 19, 2010 6:54 AM > To: NT System Admin Issues > Subject: Do you all like fewer or more servers? > > 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. > > > > > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
