I have been reading up on this Virtualization and I have a client that is currently going crazy with everything being all over the place as far as machine specs, software running on different servers and etc...
Let me give a little idea of what they have, then maybe someone can direct me on if VMware would help solve some issues.
Autobody shop has about 30 workstations. About 5 workstations are time clocks, they sit there all day and do very little processing, they stay connected to a database that is running on one server. This database I need to find out exactly what backend it uses. These 5 workstations are really old Windows 98 machines.
The other PC's are all running Windows XP Pro, each machine runs Terminal Server to connect to run this same software that the Timeclocks use, the reason we used Terminal Server is because if I run this software directly on the PC it generates so much network traffic that it is unbelievably slow. So, each user has to log into Terminal Server, run the software, this software they use to input all the work orders into. This software interfaces with Quickbooks Enterprise Server on the same server.
Now, each PC also runs 3 other pieces of software, they are all database type applications, meaning each person that makes a change, it updates on the server in realtime so everyone else sees the changes once the record is saved. so, the user has to switch between terminal server and desktop constantly throughout the day. The other 3 applications seem to run fine on the desktops and not cause an extreme amount of traffic on the network.
Along with those applications, they all run Outlook Express, email is hosted outside. They also have 3 sites that have VPN connections to them. We run 2 Windows 2000 Advanced Server, one of those runs Terminal Services and Veritas Backup Exec. One server is a dual core processor Xeon, the other is a single processeor, the dual core has 2GIGs of RAM, the single has 3Gigs of RAM. All SCSI drives, Mirrored I believe. Dual Core server has 3 nics, single core has 2 nics.
My thought is to upgrade the dual core to 2 additional processors, and have Windows Advanced Server 2000 with the 4 applications running on it, then have 16 VM's on it and upgrade memory to 16GB.
The second server would add one processor, to give it 2 and have 8 VM's running on it plus 5 more for the timeclocks using only about 256megs memory allocation to them, upgrade the server to 8gigs of RAM. Also run 2000 Advanced Server with just Veritas Backup Exec running in the middle of the night.
My thought is this will hopefully speed up all the applications because they do not have to send the data constantly over the network all the time, just across the PCI bus to the hard drives. Maybe putting the timeclocks on the busier ESX server because they use less processor time??? This would also let everyone stop having to go back and forth between the Terminal Server and etc.. So I can eliminate Terminal Services.
What could I expect from the end result? I wanted to sell it to them as a way to keep everyone on the same platform, reduce setup time for new users, normally it takes a good 6 hours to setup a new PC when they get them, pluse constantly upgrading PC hardware. All the Hardware is different too, constantly trying to fix problems on the individual PC's.
The other question is, how would I do a seamless transistion over with minimal downtime? Obviously we would have to reinstall the servers and move the applications.
Thanks for reading my long post, lots of questions I know. All new to me.
