Looking into virtualization!

Street · 8 Sep 2009 at 18:35

A few months ago a company we look after was looking at upgrading their aging kit but they didn't act on the quote we gave them. Now again as they require a piece of software that doesn't run on Server2k they have come back to us to look at changing their servers.

They are currently running two HP servers, one for terminal services and one does DC/database. I've never dealt with VMWare much before apart from using VMWare Workstation on my laptop. Would it be worth getting one server and splitting it into 3 VMs running DC/Database/TS? They have about 20 people accessing via TS and a further 10 accessing normally.

We normally supply Dell servers to clients but was wondering what the best harddrive configuration would be for the above. Maybe two small drives in RAID1 for ESXi and a few others in RAID10? 15k drives would be the best wouldn't they? I would go for two quad core CPUs and a fair bit of RAM. What are the advantages of moving to DAS instead of local disks? And also how do backups work with ESXi? The budget is around 8k max including OS licenses.

Any advice is welcome!
Thanks,
Andy

Street · 8 Sep 2009 at 18:55

Sorry I meant backups of the whole VM!

With their budget I don't think DAS is really an option so I'm best off sticking to one server.. Was just thinking of backups incase the server went down. They'd be pretty screwed with just the one box taking all 3 servers down!

Street · 8 Sep 2009 at 21:01

brainchylde said:
if the hardware dies, you've lost EVERYTHING.

Thats why I'm a bit wary of it.. But it would be good to do as none of the companies we look after are using virtualization and I would like to get into it!

Street · 8 Sep 2009 at 22:32

Haha.. I was tempted to give them that reason!

I'm just trying to push some new technologies onto clients that are stuck in the stone age at the moment!

Street · 9 Sep 2009 at 13:23

bigredshark said:
Terrifying describes it fairly well. I mean it's a lovely product and really clever with it but dear god it costs a lot for any size of solution...

Puts it a bit out of my price bracket of 8k!

Street · 9 Sep 2009 at 15:08

Right well I've come up with an idea..

Run one cheap server as a DC..
Low end Opteron, 2GB RAM, 2x 250GB SATA RAID1

Then virtualize the database and ts servers onto one beast..
2x 2.26GHz Xeon, 16GB RAM, 6x 146GB SAS RAID10 with 1 hotspare and redunant PSU.

How does that sound?

Street · 9 Sep 2009 at 17:10

Hmm.. Fair point!

Trouble is, after licensing costs are taken out of the budget it only leaves me with just over 4k. Three separate servers would be the simplest and as you said they probably won't change them for another 10 years!

Street · 10 Sep 2009 at 11:04

Given up on the visualization idea now.. Going to stick with three boxes.

1 DC.. Dell T105, 2.1GHz Opteron, 2GB RAM, 2x250GB SATA RAID1
1 DB/FS.. Dell T410, 2.0GHz Xeon, 4GB RAM, 2x146GB SAS RAID1, 2x300GB SAS RAID1, Redundant PSU
1 TS.. Dell T410, 2.4GHz Xeon, 8GB RAM, 2x146GB SAS RAID1, Redundant PSU

Works out at just about my budget with licensing costs.. TS licenses are the killer!