Advice on server migration.

mast3r said:
£20k? its more than £20k for the software alone buddy, VM, Backup Exec, SQL, SBS 2008, Server 2008 R2 Standard, BES etc.

This server web price - £81k, we paid far far less but more than 40k.
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I said £20K+. I got to £30K for near enough the spec you said (minus software). And you're spending "£40-81k" on one box (presuming that's minus software licenses) to run some pretty basic apps? Why not get two boxes and have some redundancy?

This is going to be installed in a new Estate house, for a VERY well known and wealthy individual from the UK, this server is also going to be running a some published apps, the SQL server is going to be used for WSS and some SUN Systems database, nothing heavy.
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Sounds completely overspecced then. No offence, but this has got cowboy job written all over it :)
 
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overspecced... not at all, there will be some software which i can not name for what ever reason being installed that requires 12 Cores alone.

Cowboy... didn't you know, i work for John Wayne.
 
If its something you were doing regularly 2-3 years ago then I'm sure you'll be fine. Worst case scenario is that you'll be there longer than expected.

However, if they're not sure what sort of kit you'll be moving to (P or V) then I think you have a good case for "Commercial cover? what" sort it approach.

I didnt know that you shouldnt mix Exchange & SQL on the same host. Surely that depends on the usage and kit spec? Unless I've missed something fundamental. I know that in any given server its better to have an exchange box do exchange and an sql box do sql but in a V environment???
 
This is not meant to be arrogant but I don't care what hardware you throw at SQL Server unless someone provides me with irrevocable proof SQL Server simply does NOT virtualise well AT ALL and un-fortunately neither does Microsoft Exchange (probably because the actual database back end it utilises is a form of SQL Server!!).

Save yourself a lot of head aches and put SQL and Exchange on baremetal, its like trying to get a block of wood the size of London to fit in a hole the size of a pin head.

EDIT: If your flying this Sunday and get stuck fire a message on the board, I'm working too so will be happy to help mate!
 
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ThorpedoUK said:
This is not meant to be arrogant but I don't care what hardware you throw at SQL Server unless someone provides me with irrevocable proof SQL Server simply does NOT virtualise well AT ALL and un-fortunately neither does Microsoft Exchange (probably because the actual database back end it utilises is a form of SQL Server!!).
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I think your views and opinions are either very outdated or not backed up by real world experience.

A bit on Exchange
http://www.vmware.com/solutions/business-critical-apps/exchange/

Increase the performance of your physical infrastructure by 100% or more. For example, without VMware, a single Exchange 2-7 mailbox running on a physical server can scale up to about 8,000 heavy user mailboxes. Using larger servers doesn’t help because the mailbox can’t leverage the additional capacity. With VMware, Exchange mailboxes can be scaled out on multiple smaller virtual machines to maximize the throughput of the physical server. Using this approach, we have demonstrated that Exchange can be scaled out on 8 Virtual Machines, each supporting 2,000 very heavy mailbox users, to support 16,000 users on one 16-core server.


A bit on SQL
http://www.vmware.com/solutions/business-critical-apps/sql/performance.html

VMware vSphere 4.1 can match or exceed native performance for more than 95% of SQL instances. A recent TPC-E workload study demonstrated that in typical situations, virtual machines provide 90% to 98% of the native physical performance, even for larger 8 vCPU configurations.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/perf_vsphere_sql_scalability.pdf

The graph demonstrates the 1 and 2 vCPU virtual machines performing at 92 percent of native. The 4 and 8 vCPU virtual machines achieve 88 and 86 percent of the non-virtual throughput, respectively. At 1, 2, and 4 vCPUs on the 8 CPU server, ESX is able to effectively offload certain tasks such as I/O processing to idle cores. Having idle processors also gives ESX resource management more flexibility in making virtual CPU scheduling decisions. However, even with 8 vCPUs on a fully committed system, vSphere still delivers excellent performance relative to the native system.
 
You are vastly mis-informed

Did you not read my message, I said "unless someone provides me with irrevocable proof", you just posted VMware links to me.

How is that going to convince me otherwise?

My knowledge is based on a NetApp FAS SAN Cluster, Dell PowerEdge 6850 with Quad Quad Core Xeons. 32GB RAM, NetApp professional services, 28 x fibre channel drives and SQL Server failing over and over again against a baremetal Dell PowerEdge 2850 with 4 x SAS disks and 16GB RAM.


.......its ok reading garbage like that but try and put i into production.

EDIT: Just to add the 2850 would continually destroy the VMware powered 6850 over and over again just to make that clear, it was embarassing...
 
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Vastly miss-informed? Let's not get carried away.

So, let me get this straight. You have (sounds to me like) a badly configured set-up, this has led you to the conclusion that SQL and Exchange should never be virtualized. Why didn't you say! This is absolute proof.

I appreciate you are having issues, that's fine, and please share them with us. But flat out saying they shouldn't be virtualized is just wrong. You must appreciate this?

To flip the coin, I've been running virtualized Exchange and SQL with no issues for over a year now, performance is great :cool:
 
Also I will add some real world experience since that dark day, after testing and losing confidence in VMware we went for Citrix XenServer.

Why?

Far more optimized, faster, faster, faster, crap GUI, GUI crap

Ok so the GUI is crap compared to VMware but the underlying ideal is far more optimised, VMware is a joke now, to give you an idea you used to be able to add new disks to VM's on the fly but they suddenly took that away and now you have to reboot.

ESXi is a fat bloated joke, blame EMC for firing 99% of its original founders!
 
Also, I have deployed Citrix XenServer 5.6 in a data centre pooler master configuration with 4 R900's with hex core processors against two MD3000i's, not exactly the greatest disk array of all time but the performance was exceptional!

Forget ESXi, its such a pile of garbage, like the EMC arrays.
 
ethos said:
Vastly miss-informed? Let's not get carried away.

So, let me get this straight. You have (sounds to me like) a badly configured set-up, this has led you to the conclusion that SQL and Exchange should never be virtualized. Why didn't you say! This is absolute proof.

I appreciate you are having issues, that's fine, and please share them with us. But flat out saying they shouldn't be virtualized is just wrong. You must appreciate this?

To flip the coin, I've been running virtualized Exchange and SQL with no issues for over a year now, performance is great :cool:
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No, I did not say I had a badly configure set up, I said that ESXi could not handle Exchange or SQL Server virtualised in a "normal" environment, it was nothing special, neither VMware nor NetApp professional services could resolve the issue so that "YOU have a badly configured" becomes a VMware (EMC) and NetApp (blaming EMC) setup issue.

I stand by my EXPERIENCE, SQL Server NOR Exchange support ESX(i) in a normal NON DEV setup.......... I or not.
 
However, being the professional that I am, please enlighten me to what steps you would have taken to perfect, tune and stream line the performance of both platforms on VMware.
 
ethos said:
I'm sorry, I can't take you seriously any more.
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I don't care. I base it on experience and that is what it is.

Ultimately EMC own VMWARE yet all of VMware's original founders were fired, do I believe EMC SAN Arrays are special? NO

I stand by my quote, ESX(i) is a fat bloated joke.
 
ethos said:
To flip the coin, I've been running virtualized Exchange and SQL with no issues for over a year now, performance is great :cool:
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This. We do it at over 50 client sites around the country on inexpensive servers.

Thorpedo, you must appreciate that your experience != everybody's experience. And your "I don't care, I'm right" attitude makes you come across as a right ****.
 
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The decision to virtualise SQL or Exchange is based entirely upon 1) Your storage infrastructure and 2) The resources available in your virtual cluster.

To say "you should" or "you shouldn't" is a bit non-sensical, because, as with everything in IT, it depends.

We don't virtualise SQL, but we did virtualise Exchange. It currently supports 6k+ users, perhaps 100 very heavy usage, 3-400 heavy and from there the use is occassional and minimal. We have no problems at all and everything copes well. If I need to expand it further, I can utilise the resources on my VMWare Cluster.

This doesn't mean everyone should follow this rule - it just happens to work for us.
 
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