We are in the midst of virtualizing and consolidating our infrastructure and have several file servers that we need to virtualize and/or consolidate. The existing plan will consolidate 5 windows file servers into a singe vm with 4 TB of storage. We have another file server that we intend to virtualize that will require 4 TB of storage by itself. I am wondering if it is wise to add the second system into the consolidation or keep it separate? My concern is whether we will be creating a bottleneck on the single system and whether our backups would perform better with the smaller disks. The file shares are used by business critical applications so throughput is a bit of a concern. These VMs will be in a 4 host cluster running DRS with a 10 gig connection (1 Gb vmotion, 5 Gb vm traffic, 4 Gb storage). We will be spanning vmdks across 4 iSCSI datastores on our NetApp 3270 (we benchmarked RDM and found that the vmdks perform better). We are currently using Backup Exec to backup at the OS level but are in the process of implementing NetBackup to do both the OS level and VM backups (still doing some tests to optimize). So do we consolidate to 1 VM or keep the 2nd?
