Should I Virtualize/Colocate/Consolidate?

[mikecLA]

I am paying over $400/mo for a dedicated Windows Server from 1and1. The box is five years old, and I've been reluctant to upgrade, due to the fact that I'd have to move everything, reconfigure, etc... Figured it's worth exploring other options first (and if I did upgrade I would most likely switch hosts). Running a Quad 2.4Ghz Dual Core AMD Opteron 2216HE, 8 Gig Ram, Hardware RAID (Areca ARC-1110)

Also have a linux server that runs another $100 or so/ month, and an inhouse asterisk server.

What I'm thinking about is one box, virtualized, to run a Windows Server and Linux Server for production on two separate public IP's, then an internal network (so I can tunnel into it) and on the Internal Network I would have sandboxes for Windows & Linux and also move the asterisk server to it.

I'm in Los Angeles and can pay someone like rackalley $129/mo to colocate the box.

My questions:

Is this a viable option (as opposed to 2 dedicated servers) for production?

From a cost perspective based on my needs (about 5 VM's, maybe another for managing an internal network) what's the cheapest option -- Xen or VmWare?

Thinking of going Whitebox, hardware recommendations welcome, also, how many NIC cards would I need?

What else am I missing? Just seems like paying $129 for a 4U colocated box and the capability to walk in there and upgrade my hardware at any time beats being locked into a contract at 1and1 where my cost is going to remain the same every month, hardware gets outdated, and it becomes a major hassle to move everything to another server (since they won't upgrade the physical box or drop the exorbitant pricing based on ancient specs).

 

[mikecLA]

On second thought, I may not want to build it. If I can get away with hardware that's not the latest and greatest (been doing it for 5 years anyway) it might be easier/faster/cheaper to buy one prebuilt on fleabay

 

[netsider]

Just purely out of curiosity, what do you use your dedicated server for?

 

[mikecLA]

Windows Box is used to host a corporate website & SQL Server, data intensive operations, and it gets a bit of traffic. Also host a few other sites, landing pages and blogs on it.

The Linux server is primarily for wordpress blogs.

 

[Nate7311]

On second thought, I may not want to build it. If I can get away with hardware that's not the latest and greatest (been doing it for 5 years anyway) it might be easier/faster/cheaper to buy one prebuilt on fleabay

How much horsepower do you need? 3rd party/refurb servers can go pretty cheap on fleabay. I've watched HP DL360 G5 2xIntel Quad/16GB servers go for ~$200 many times.

 

[mikecLA]

How much horsepower do you need? 3rd party/refurb servers can go pretty cheap on fleabay. I've watched HP DL360 G5 2xIntel Quad/16GB servers go for ~$200 many times.

Not really sure, looking at this page http://www.cpubenchmark.net/multi_cpu.html to see where I can get the biggest bang for my buck. Pretty much anything is going to run better than my existing windows box (Quad Dual Core Opteron 2214).

I just looked at fleabay -- I can get a G5 with Dual E5450's for $279 (not including drives), use it to replace my windows box, and pay $89/mo to colocate it. That might even be enough to do the whole virtualization thing, but I was thinking maybe a little more juice, 32Gig Ram and hardware RAID 5

 

[Nate7311]

Unless you are doing some serious number crunching with your SQL box, I can't imagine that you'll have any issues virtualizing it all on 1 box. In my mind, the question would be your hypervisor of choice.

 

[mikecLA]

Unless you are doing some serious number crunching with your SQL box, I can't imagine that you'll have any issues virtualizing it all on 1 box. In my mind, the question would be your hypervisor of choice.

I am leaning toward Xen/XCP -- Playing with it now in a nested Vmware workstation setup, but vSphere is not out of the question, just haven't figure out cost issues on it yet.

For the server, there sure are tons of choices in the sub $2,500 range on ebay. That would be about the max. price point the whole setup should be to make this cost effective beyond a year.

Edit: How about something like this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-PowerE...312145?pt=COMP_EN_Servers&hash=item35c65df191

 

[MrGuvernment]

is any of that stuff mission critical, do you have a backup system in place?

if it is data intensive, how much I/O you pushing through, alot of VM solutions give simple 2 drive raid 1 or charge a fortune for faster raid 10 4 drive arrays, at least what i have seen, or just make sure you got enough ram that your DB is pretty much all in memory.

Have you take any performance measurements of what your current systems run like?

 

[mikecLA]

is any of that stuff mission critical, do you have a backup system in place?

I have an image of the server (which I have used to simulate a dummy recovery procedure that worked), backups of data, and another 1and1 server as a backup with data replicated to it.

For the server, I've decided to go with a Dell R710, 2 X5570 CPU's 48Gig Ram, 8x300gb SAS drives (7 in Raid 6 +1 Hotspare) and will most likely go with ESXi instead of XEN.

A bit overkill, but it was only a couple of hundred more than my initial budget, should be future proof for awhile, and will blow away the dedicated server I have now at 1&1.