Phonix wrote:
Thats great Matt! Virtualization can be intimidating at first, but once you grasp the key concepts, it's just a matter of pushing the right buttons.
You must have had some major problems for virtualization to be the cheaper solution, it's usually the opposite.
Not to mention some face melting specs on your servers (should your company be big enough to warrant that many vm's)
Oh, Matt, may I add one more thing:
We considered virtualization here, but decided not to in order to maintain redundancy and dedication.
Remember, when your virtualization server goes down, so does everything else. Did you factor that into your DR and backups?
Absolutely it was considered! I went with a cluster of 3 HP DL360 G5 servers, each with dual quad-core 2.83GHz procs, 32GB RAM, Fiber Channel cards, 6 GB nics, redundant fans and powersupplies. They are all running a DAS installed ESX 3.5 Enterprise (we have the Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 Enterprise suite licensed for 6 processors) on a mirrored array consisting of 2 15K SAS hard drives. The 3 servers all have high availability, distributed resource scheduler, vMotion, Storage vMotion, etc.
On the back of that for running our VM's we have a HP EVA4000 fiber channel SAN (dual controllers and switches so there is a failover path in case one line dies) with 14 142GB 10K Fiber attached SCSI drives (1TB LUN for our file server and 400GB for our VM snapshot/backup LUN). The VM's are running off of another shelf consisting of 12 450GB 15K Fiber attached SCSI drives. On top of that we have redundant Cisco 3560G switches as the backbone for the servers.
Right now I am running around 25 VM's, mostly all are Server 2003 R2 Enterprise. I plan on licensing Datacenter 2008 next year and upgrading them all to that, simply for the OS licensing savings there.
Our vCenter Foundation/bacukp server is an HP DL380 G5 with 2 dual core 2.33GHz procs, 12GB RAM, 4 10K SAS drives in RAID 5, dual fiber channel cards, redundant fans and power supplies. This talks to a HP MSL2024 LTO3 fiber channel tape library and a rack mount LTO4 SCSI drive for the backups and uses Vizioncore vRanger Pro and Symantec Backup Exec 12.5 to do that actual backups.
It's a nice setup and a great spot for learning the basics of VMware.
Now is a good time for people to feel bad about their home servers LOL.
Cheers,
Matt
_________________
odis172 wrote:
I have A+.
I feel like a handicap 5 year old next to a nuclear physicist.