Hi all, I've been struggling for weeks on how to best layout our network with our VMWare images.
OUR SETUP
We have a single HP DL380 G7 Proliant server (Octo-Xeon) acting as our primary ESXi Host, with 11 VMs running on it (basically all of our servers). Originally this was setup with a single 600GB datastore, and so we have had disk IO issues from several database intensive apps running in 4-5 (MySQL on 2, Kaseya, SQL server for Dynamics) of the VMs and the 11 VMs all sharing 4 NICs. I'm now planning on getting enough 10k HDDs to have no more than 1-2 of our VMs running per datastore, and then getting 3x4 NIC cards to give each VM it's own dedicated NIC. We currently backup everything using AppAssure from a separate dedicated box and then replicate the backups to a 2nd location to a NAS (about 2TB all told).
While our company certainly is mindful of the budget, I am able to spend what is necessary, but I don't want to waste resources if it overkill.
Q1) Does the proposed hardware sound like overkill?
REMOTE ISSUE
I'm looking to do one of 2 things:
1) Simply have remote backups in a 2nd location as we are doing now, but with some additional hardware to be able to test restore some of the VMs to ensure the backups are success in the remote location.
2) Use some other tool to basically move copies of our existing VMWare images to a remote host where they will remain in a turned off state, but prepared to be brought up if we experience a diaster at our primary site.
Again our needs are really quite simple when it comes right down to it, 11 VMs, single host, and about 2TB of data, this seems too simple to have wrestled with this as much as I have. Would a SAN or NAS make more sense for some of this stuff? My end goal is to have this be as automated as possible, and to have it "just work". I just get lost in the sea of various VMware software and knowing what to choose.
Anyone have any recommendations, I can provide more info if needed.
Ryan
