Dell/Brocade/EMC for VMware and Stroage

[sidethink]

I'm currently at the early stages of planning a project to migrate around 30 physical servers (about 20 running small MS SQL databases, the remainder running IIS) to a VMWare environment.

The overall programme has a strategic alignment with Dell and therefore I am likely to be strongly encouraged down the Dell/Brocade/EMC route. Anyone have any strong opinions either way on this? Any real reason to fight this and head in a different direction?

I'm trying to look forward and consider consolidating one or two other small projects into this infrastructure but it will never be larger than 40 servers with a useable storage requirement of 10TB max. At the moment the (Dell) system folks are telling me I can do all of this with a handful of beefy 2950s, a small SAN and a couple of Brocade switches. They had initally tried to spec blades but I steered them away from that thinking Dell blades were poor cousins to HP or IBM - am I wrong?

We will be using some of the WMware enterprise features like HA and VMotion but I can't really see us doing anything too cutting edge with this.

 

[sidethink]

Thanks for the advice guys.

I had considered a good portion of what you have each said but thanks for the extra little bits of wisdom.

Thankfully we have a good relationship with VMware (global Enterprise partner) so we get decent discount on their software for inhouse usage (read free atm).

I've been speaking to some guys in the wider business here who have deployed a couple of small SANs and VM infrastructures for other projects and should be able to tap in to their experience.

This project looks like it might become quite strategic and touch a range of services we offer so it should get the support and attention it deserves. Rather than having to design and build it, I get to play the internal customer (albeit a picky, fussy grumpy old sod kind of customer).

I'll be meeting with the various Test and Development teams soon to see if they have the appetite and funds to come on board although I may just end up having something built with them in mind rather than ready for them at day one.

I assume that as long as I size the fabric and storage correctly I can expand to provide them services when I need to (i.e. I can just buy some more servers and software when they are ready).