The super virtualization engineering team here at Dell recently upgraded the Dell Virtualization Advisor Tool. This free on-line tool prompts you to answer about 10 questions and then gives a detailed sizing of servers and storage. Additionally it will list the available services that might be useful when implementing the proposed solution. The part that I really like is it is easy to go back and change your answers to some of the questions to see how that affects the proposed solution. For example you can change your preferred storage from fibre channel to iSCSI.
In addition to support for VMware based solutions, it will now also provide Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer based solutions as well. So for those that are interested in what is needed for a Hyper-V solution with high-availability and "quick-migration" the advisor can help. Additionally if you want to get the specifications for a Xen Server solution with live migration and backup and recovery capabilities - the advisor has a configuration recommendation.
The other new feature of the advisor tool is the ability to specify what workloads you will be running in the VMs which makes the sizing more accurate. You are able to specify the number of test and dev, file servers, web servers, domain controller, DNS servers, and other you will be running as VMs.
Take advantage of the free advice.
Todd