Using ESXi for File Shares

[isegc]

Hi All

OS: Windows 2003 STD 32 Bit

Currently our FSMO DC is also a File Server with lots of shares and printers running on a DELL PE2650

We purchased a Dell PowerEdge 2950, 8 GB RAM, 1.5 TB RAID5 to move the FSMO DC, but the OS Upgrade wasn't approved, so because Windows 2003 STD can't use more than 4 GB RAM we would like to Divide the server in 2, 1 server just for DC, DNS and WINS and 1 server to host the file shares and use ESXi to host the 2 servers on the Dell PE2950

1st Question and our Main concern: Is ESXi suitable to host file shares that 200 Users have mapped drives to and running applications of?

2 since the Dell PE2950 has 2 NIC's can we dedicate a NIC to the file share Server?

TIA

[Gerrit_Lehr · Accepted solution]

1: Yes, that is no problem.

2: Yes, you will need to create a seperate vSwich for the file server with seperate uplink NIC and use the second NIC on a second vSwitch for Management and the other VMs.

Kind Regards,

Gerrit Lehr

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[bulletprooffool]

1. Yes absolutely, though if you have a large amount of traffic, you will possibly want to dedicate a cpule of nics to a vSwitch for this Server.

2. Yes . . but again . . for Fault tolerance etc, it may be worth adding more Nics