Deployment advise

[Russell0311]

HI

I am starting a project to virtualise my 13 production servers, These are running the core windows infrastructure (AD/DNS/DHCP), Exchange 2003 2 node cluster, SQL Server 2005, file and print services, OWA Windows load balanced 2 node cluster.

I am thinking of deploying 3 HP Proliant servers (I am trying to decide between DL380/385's or DL580/DL585), alongside either a netapp, HP EVA or Equallogic SAN, to be decided. I also need to decide between ISCSI or Fibre channel fabric. Any comment or advise would be good on these products, my storage requirements are quite minimal approx 4TB to start.

Once I have decided on these I am then not sure if I should virtualise all my servers our do some of the MS apps not lend themselves to virtualisation.

I am also thinking of deploying Exchange 2007 quite quickly after the migration to virtualisation and wondered how the vmware environment handles 64 processing alongside 32 bit.

Any advise would be greatly received

Russell.

[vmrulz]

There are many answers and opinions to this type of question.. and most of them start with "it depends". If you have fairly low utilization of your DB and Mail servers they may be candidates.. however I would save them for last with adequate testing prior to doing the actual migration. Most other servers are easily "virtualizable".

Hardware choices are varied and numerous. For us HP on AMD is our standard with mostly DL585's (32GRAM, 8cores, dual HBA's, 6 NIC's). If you aren't looking at much growth though you could easily get away with 385's with half the resources for that server count. Three qty 385's with one for redundancy. SAN is another can-o-worms. We run on EMC CX and DMX which is perhaps a little high end for your needs.

Do some searching on these forums and vmware, this topic is very popular.

[mnol]

Hi Russell

On the Fibre v iscsi issue you'll probably find you'll get better performance from the fibre but iscsi is catching up fast. On the downside fibre is more expensive, harder to configure and, importantly, harder to troubleshoot. We've just had an obscure problem with the config on a fibre swith and even though our tech guy is very good and is experienced at configuring the switches we were glad to have 24x7 support. The support guys could remote in and replicate the problem easily enough but it took them a couple of hours to come up with a fix, during which time an important server couldn't access the SAN.

Regards

Mike

[doubleH]

You are in the same position as i was before my deployment although i had a few more servers, but for the most part your environment looks like the size of mine. I decided to go with an EqualLogic PS100E iSCSI san because of my research and my network infastructure could handle it (my 2nd one should be arriving next week). My ESX hosts are 2 x DL385G2's. Each has 2 x Dual Core AMD opterons with 22gb each. I am using QLogic 4052c HBAs to connect to the san. We will be adding a 3rd DL385G2 in 2008. I went the iSCSI route because I am a 1 man shop and didn't want the complexity of FC in my environment and many of the iSCSI devices perform just as well as the FC ones (not all, but many). I could go on about my experience with EqualLogic storage, but don't want this thread to head down the vendor bashing path. PM me if you want more details.

As for your deployment plan I would recommend you leave critical applications with high exposure (EG Exchange) until the end of your project. Use low hanging fruit (easy servers such as file/print/web/dev servers) to virtualize first. These typically have less exposure if things go wrong and they should give you a few early wins under your belt which you will need to calm down all the "nay sayers" or vmware haters.

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[dalepa]

We run 950+ VMs on Netapp over NFS across 35 ESX hosts... We migrated off FC SAN this year. Here are some reason to use NFS for vmware.

[Russell0311]

Hi

Which NetApp are you using?

Russell

[dalepa]

We are using a fas3070c with a R200 as a snapmirror destination to keep 21 days of vm backups