Benefits of Server 2019 VM for small office

Ish · 14 Jul 2020 at 22:32

Hi All

The scenario is a small office with 8 clients pcs and one Dell server. What is the benefits if any of installing Server 2019 Standard as a VM on the server VS doing a bare metal install?

Throrik · 14 Jul 2020 at 23:39

The main benefit for such a small installation to be virtualised is scalability, you can add additional VMs going forward should you grow and have other requirements. The other is separation of roles, what do you plan on putting on this server? That would give us more indication of any potential benefits.

glenimp617 · 15 Jul 2020 at 13:34

Throrik said:
The main benefit for such a small installation to be virtualised is scalability, you can add additional VMs going forward should you grow and have other requirements. The other is separation of roles, what do you plan on putting on this server? That would give us more indication of any potential benefits.

Speed of reboots would be a definate plus

Deleted member 77746 · 15 Jul 2020 at 13:52

Is this a homework question?

Throrik · 15 Jul 2020 at 14:04

TheOracle said:
Speed of reboots would be a definate plus

Yeah, I kind of thought that anyone looking at virtualising a single server platform wouldn't have huge swathes of ECC RAM to do a POST on each time haha - unlike the fact that I was having to reboot SR650s with 1.5TB RAM every few days not long ago, what a nightmare that was waiting for the POST.

glenimp617 · 15 Jul 2020 at 14:14

Throrik said:
Yeah, I kind of thought that anyone looking at virtualising a single server platform wouldn't have huge swathes of ECC RAM to do a POST on each time haha - unlike the fact that I was having to reboot SR650s with 1.5TB RAM every few days not long ago, what a nightmare that was waiting for the POST.

Yeah, I have felt the pain on many occassion. We have a cluster of dell blades with large amounts of ram, and rebooting them takes forever.

Ish · 15 Jul 2020 at 16:56

Throrik said:
The main benefit for such a small installation to be virtualised is scalability, you can add additional VMs going forward should you grow and have other requirements. The other is separation of roles, what do you plan on putting on this server? That would give us more indication of any potential benefits.

It is just used for AD, print/file server.

Throrik · 16 Jul 2020 at 00:41

Ish said:
It is just used for AD, print/file server.

If you have the capability, resources and licenses I would virtualize it and create a secondary server as if you only have one of these servers and it goes down then it's going to be a pain in the rear, even with backups restoring a DC doesn't always go to plan.

Euphoria · 26 Jul 2020 at 22:17

It's all down to cost. If it's one server install bare metal, if you go virtual you need backups and alsorts and cannot justify with only 8 users.

Caged · 27 Jul 2020 at 00:01

If you just have 8 staff how have you determined that you need a server and associated licensing?

Throrik · 27 Jul 2020 at 00:01

Euphoria said:
It's all down to cost. If it's one server install bare metal, if you go virtual you need backups and alsorts and cannot justify with only 8 users.

So you don't need backups on bare metal? I'm not convinced of your logic there.

edscdk · 27 Jul 2020 at 00:06

Ad is a good idea in a larger company or if you need uber security.. For an average company with less than 10 staff go for a shared drive on a windows workstation.. assuming you just want a shared drive anyone can access..

Throrik · 27 Jul 2020 at 00:36

edscdk said:
Ad is a good idea in a larger company or if you need uber security.. For an average company with less than 10 staff go for a shared drive on a windows workstation.. assuming you just want a shared drive anyone can access..

From post #7 it looks like they already have AD setup etc, but I may be wrong.

Euphoria · 27 Jul 2020 at 09:49

Throrik said:
So you don't need backups on bare metal? I'm not convinced of your logic there.

Your adding complexity to an extra layer of management. I am not saying you dont need backup but you have another system to patch and backup.

Ish · 30 Jul 2020 at 13:11

Caged said:
If you just have 8 staff how have you determined that you need a server and associated licensing?

As a registered charity we get a massive discount on Microsoft Server.

We actually already have the bare metal install of 2019 with all the server roles I mentioned and have no issues but I saw that someone who has a very similar setup to us have a server with Server 2019 installed as the o/s and then a Server 2019 VM for all the roles I mentioned which made me wonder what the benefits of doing it this way was.

Euphoria · 30 Jul 2020 at 13:26

Ish said:
As a registered charity we get a massive discount on Microsoft Server.

We actually already have the bare metal install of 2019 with all the server roles I mentioned and have no issues but I saw that someone who has a very similar setup to us have a server with Server 2019 installed as the o/s and then a Server 2019 VM for all the roles I mentioned which made me wonder what the benefits of doing it this way was.

advantage of a VM is you can back up the entire OS and restore is often much easier than baremetal restores if something was to go wrong. However hosting it on a hypervisor adds complexity and you need to take into account additional risk.

You could use 2019 on baremetal and run other 2019 vms within that