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

Five_Star · 10 Oct 2008 at 10:09

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

Five_Star · 10 Oct 2008 at 10:31

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.

Five_Star · 10 Oct 2008 at 11:07

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

Five_Star · 14 Oct 2008 at 13:25

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.

Five_Star · 16 Oct 2008 at 16:11

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?