Hello guys!
We're a small company with 12 employees currently running SBS 2003 Standard. In addition to the standard SBS server roles, we also have a bunch of other 3rd party software (CRM, etc) running on this server. This "server" is actually a Pentium 4 PCwe set up a few years ago when we started the company and it seems likeit's finally starting to choke (CPU and memory usage is very high).Also, our 3rd party software provider has demanded that we provide a dedicated 2003 server (or VM) for their applications and offload themfrom the SBS. We realized it's time to upgrade the server. Since we're on a very tight budget we could not afford to purchase 2 servers so we were considering a virtualization solution. One VM would run the SBS 2003 server and the other would run the "line of business" server with 3rd party software. This week we finally made a step forward and purchased a new Dell R710 server but a lot of questions still remain open. I am posting them here hoping to get as many answers as possible 
Thanks in advance to all those who can help.
1. What RAID setup should we use? Our new server has 4 x 2.5" 300GB 10k RPM drives. 600GB of storage should suffice (since we currently do pretty well with 150) so we can go with either RAID 5 or RAID 10.
2. I'm assuming this has been asked many times before in various forms, but should we install ESXi on a flash USB drive or the disk array? I understand the R710 supports "Embedded ESXi" yet at the time of ordering the only options available were for embedded ESXi v3.5 at an additional cost so we skipped that.
3. As to backup, I'm totally confused. There are so many solutions out there I kinda got lost. We currently have both Backup Exec v11 and
Backup Exec System Recovery v7 installed on the SBS 2003. Moving to a virtual server configuration probably requires some modifcations to this setup so I can backup both VMs. A full image based backup is important since we can't afford the downtime of reinstalling the OS and software. This is why we purchased BE System Recovery for image based backup and BE for file backup (I'm paranoid so I do both). Offsite backup is also important - we previously used tape drives and a offsite rotation schedule but with the new server we'll switch to portable external hard drives (since purchasing a new tape drive is not on our budget and the previous one was internal and low capacity). What are the changes required to keep our backup intact?
4. Should I use pre-allocated storage for each VM or dynamic allocation?
Thanks in advance,
Danny
