ESX design - Query

[atm11]

Hi,

I am new to designing and implementation. Attached picture has my proposed design.

I have a task to choose a server for an ESX 4 implementation.

Ideally my environment would have 2 hosts for fault tolerance.

The virtual servers hosted in these servers will be:

1. Active Directory ( less than 1000 objects) - 4gb ram - 300GB storage ( Vm will have windows server 2008 , plus Active Directory)

2. Mcafee Antivirus server

Windows Patch managment Server - 4gb ram - 200GB storage ( Vm will have windows server 2008 , plus AV and patch mgmt applications)

3. Commvault Backup server. - 6gb ram - 200GB storage (VM will have windows server 2008 , plus commvault backup server)

The storage is only for the VMs , for backup a seperate storage will be there.

Ideally I will go for a server having 16gb ram with a 1TB storage.

What server should I go for from the HCL? preferable something in HP .

Is Mcafee providing Total Endpoint for esx adn VMs?

[ChrisDearden]

What licences will you be going for ? if you cluster the Hosts for HA and you purchases the relevent level of licence , you can be a little bit more dynamic for your guest allocations. If you have shared storgae between your hosts you wouldn't need primary and secondary VM's to cover host hardware failuer ( although your applicaiton design may well include it )

It seems like you are using a lot of storage for those VM's ? Why do you want to give a GC for 1000 object 300 GB of drive space ?

Not having used comvault before , is it particularly CPU intensive ?

Going with what I know , I'd be reaching for the DL380G6/G7 with a couple of quad core CPU , but that might be overkill for your budget.

I believe the only vendor with an endpoint solution for vshield on the market today is trend micro, but I'm sure MacAfee will be along soon.

@chrisdearden

[idle-jam]

Looking the design 2 Hosts with 2 way 6 cores with 16GB of RAM would be suffice. On top of that may i suggest HP Lefthand VSA which will virtualize your local hdd as an ISCSI which would allow you to HA and VMotion. You could setup VSA on both node and have them mirror one another.

For license wise, you could just go with vsphere essential plus that comes with VMotion and HA. btw, you will need a vm for VMware vCenter for the VMotion and HA (creating) to work.

iDLE-jAM | VCP 2, VCP 3 & VCP 4

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[atm11]

Hi all ,

License : Enterprise Plus

I will be going for a DL380 G7 - 2 servers. Money wont be all that an issue.

Quadcore with 2.66 Ghz.

Its a 1GigE connection , I just got 2 NICs. Is that advisable ? Or should I go for more NICs and do NIC teaming.

How many NICs should I go for and what service should I give for each NIC? I was thinking of getting pairs of Intel and Broadband NICs to get redundancy among NICs.I have read in some Vmware forums that 4 NICs is ideal per host where the connection is 1GigE.

[idle-jam · Accepted solution]

HP DL380G8 has already comes onboard 2 NIC port. With that i would suggest getting another card with Quad Port (the cost of dual and quad is not much) Hence you will have a total of 2 NIC port. You will need these port for Service Console, VMotion, FT, VM Traffic and etc. You can search around and there are extensive threads on NIC allocation, but 6 is a sweet spot.

Depending on the switch that you're connected to, you might want to configure link aggregation which would give higher bandwidth as well as resiliency.

iDLE-jAM | VCP 2, VCP 3 & VCP 4

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