Major upgrade – 6 into 1 virtualisation + new SAN, help!

Five_Star

Five_Star

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Due to an insurance claim at work all our servers are being replaced. We are going to replace 6 servers (Domain, mail, dev, SQL, file & print) onto one box as it's a small company and non of the older boxes were loaded very much anyway.

We’re happy with running Microsoft Hyper-V, probably on Server 2008 Standard rather than Core so we can user the Hyper-V management role directly on the machine, we’ve used it before for remote sites running core. The only problem is going to be moving from Small business server 2003 to small business server 2008. Has anybody got any experience of this, moving all the Users, Groups and moving the Exchange mail boxes?

Also, the old setup all servers had local storage and we had a small NAS for public space etc. This is getting replaced by an SAN using iSCSI.
I personally have no experience with iSCSI or SANs. I understand the basics that they are better for a virtualised environment as they present the shared disks to each virtual machine as local disk but other than that I’m not sure whats the best way to administer the SAN, how it will connect to the network and other Server we have etc.

I guess I’m looking for some reassurance that this setup is going to work and some tips on how best to manage it in the future.

Cheers
 
Looks interesting, I guess it will depend how long the insurance takes to come back with the money / goods as we'll have to swap right away.
 
It's saved me a load of hassle in the past as you don't have to mess around rejoining workstations to the domain. The SIDs and desktop profiles remain intact.
When you're talking SBS installs though, it's a relatively low number of users and in some cases, I suppose it's easier just to recreate the users and exmerge the store.
 
Yeah there is only nine of us. Looking at it we have more service accounts than real users. Each SQL server has four accounts for each of the users and jobs that SQL needs to run its agents under! I thought it would be a good time to improve the AD layout and add some new groups to help future management.

I appreciate this is about as small as you get and feels quite lame posting in Enterprise solutions but as I'm not a full time support engineer I need all the help I can get with this new kit

Cheers
 
Swing is the way to go for SBS migrations - it just works and is pretty elegant, once you get your head round what you are doing. Its also quite well documented and proven by lots of field experience.

If you have loads of time, no users to placate, and unlimited resources then building from scratch might offer some advantage!
 
It seems the insurance people are going really slowly on this one so I'm not expecting any new kit soon, I was thinking this would be an ideal time to improve my knowledge of server / SAN architecture, can anybody recommend some useful resources?

p.s. I've already read all the Dell info on the kit we would receive.
 
iSCSI is great at the moment, but please don't use the same ethernet infrastructure for storage and data traffic, iSCSI is cheap and sure you can mix the two but for the price of a small Gb switch doesn't even really need to be any more than a 8 port netgear or dlink its just not work your server loosing its disks because some bad NIC on the data network decides to send out a load of broadcasts.
 
We are likely to have two 24 port gigabit switches running together for load balancing and redundancy. Would it be ok to separate the office traffic / general data and the iSCSI traffic into two different vlans rather than spate physical network gear?
 
fine from that point of view yeah, not so fine from some problem that might take them both out, like some kind of loop on the data network causing them both to max their CPU, i've seen it happen.

I'd still invest in seperate switches for storage and all my iSCSI experiences have validated that.
 
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