Planning the installation

[DSRSAS]

I have to virtulize a physcial datacenter having a mix of windows 2000, 2003 and 2008 servers and exchnage servers and database servers.

Now I am kind of lost.. on how to start desigining the infrastructure. I am having a Dell blade server attached to a storage. Now I need to virtulize all these servers. My confusion in on following points

1. should I virtulize the Domain controllers?

2. How do I reach a conlusion that how much resource should allocated to a VM ( the physical server which I will be virtuailzing)

3. Should I keep the Vcenter server a physcial system or a VM.

4. How do I plane a backups

I would highly appreciate anyone can shed some light on this

Regards

DS

[krowczynski · Accepted solution]

Hi,

so lets talk

>>Should I virtulize the Domain controllers?

This should be no problem, in our company we have 2 of them in a vm

>>Should I keep the Vcenter server a physcial system or a VM

I would prefer to put it on a vm. GIve him 2vcpu and 3gbRAM and everything will be fine

>>How do I plane a backups

Use free tools like ghettoVCB or buy esxpress or veem backup.

MCP, VCP

[DSRSAS]

hi,

Thanks for the reply.. It was really helpful.

How do we go about

Reaching a conlusion that how much resource should be allocated to a VM ( the physical server which I will be virtuailzing)

Regards

DS

[krowczynski]

It depends on what applications are running in a vm.

For and ADS e.g. a vm with 1vcpu and 512MB RAM is sufficient.

MCP, VCP

[DSRSAS]

My question is reguarding the existing server. For eg: If i had to virtualize a existing Exchange server with the dual Xeon processor and 8 GB Ram to a VM and how do I decide how much resource i should actually allow to that VM.

I have read reguarding a guided consolidation which will give a confidence metics, but I feel that i will rather tell that how good is the server to be virtulize and on which host it should go.

Is there any way or tool which would recommend that in actual how much processors and memory should be assigned to a physcial server which we are planning to virtulize.

[jjewett]

My question is reguarding the existing server. For eg: If i had to virtualize a existing Exchange server with the dual Xeon processor and 8 GB Ram to a VM and how do I decide how much resource i should actually allow to that VM.

I have read reguarding a guided consolidation which will give a confidence metics, but I feel that i will rather tell that how good is the server to be virtulize and on which host it should go.

The Guided Consolidation is a good free tool for resource planning. There is also the VMware Capacity Planner tool that has more features, but costs money. I thought the recommendations from PaulCooper in this post were helpful too.

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1096042

In my experience with P2V migrations I've notice you can generally get by with less CPU resources. However, thread-aware software like databases (this would include Exchange) perform better with more vCPUs. Additonally, databases tend to suck up all the RAM that the OS provides but that doesn't mean your server will perform better with more RAM. We are fortunate to have newer hardware so personally, my rule of thumb is 1vCPU and 2GB RAM on a typical Windows based application server. If a bottleneck is noticed by users and confirmed by vCenter performance tab, then on the next power cycle I'll bump the resource needed. In the case of our largest SQL Server VMs we have a couple servers configured with 4 vCPUs and 16GB of RAM. I personally think we overcommitted the resources because the performance stats don't reflect the need. But if we want we can also pull back the vCPU and RAM resources on next downtime too.

Either way you are covered, but I would just recommend underestimating and watch the VM resource trends carefully for a couple days then add resource if needed.

Jonathan