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Talk to me about Virtualization

M

marley1

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jul 18, 2000
Messages
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We generally service the small to medium business up to 50 computers. Generally we have a single Small Business Server or a SBS Server and a Member Server.

We have picked up a smaller Municipality that due to legal reasons each department needs to be separate. So we would need a internal domain for the Village, one for the Court, and one for the Police. The only thing they share is the same external domain name. Currently what we have done is install an Exchange server on the Village side and the other sections connect over HTTPS. This works fine.

We are going to be doing a full overhaul as servers are going on 7 years old.

I started to think about virtualization. I do want some redundancy so I was curious what you would really need to get 1 main server holding says 4 hosts (SBS Server for Village, Server 08 for Court, Server 08 for police DC and Server 08 for police LOB Applications). How would you do a failover, and what should the data be stored too?

Is this a good idea for this size network, only 30 computers total.

What would you spec out for this?
 
If you want it all on one server and looking at cheap, looking into ESXi free, if you want a bit of redundancy and some nice features like HA and DR, look into vSphere Essentials Plus.

Depending on your needs, there's all sorts of servers which could be recommended. If your looking into vSphere, or just want things on a NAS and are on a budget(looks like it) get a solid but not too expensive NAS like one of the Synology 1010 or 1511.

I'll let others chime in here, but if your looking for cheap and supporting only 30 users and 4 virtual servers, IMHO you could get away with ESXi Free, just make sure you have good back-ups.
 
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The new ESXi has a 32 gb of ram limit per box. If your never going to go past that your fine.
 
Well from a physical hardware aspect I am looking at:

Dell 2u SBS Server - 2 x Quad Xeon, 16GB, 7 x 300GB SAS (Raid1/Raid5 Hotspare)
Dell 2u Domain/File - Single Xeon, 12GB, etc
Dell 1u - Small DC - 2 x 250GB SATA
Dell 2u - LOB Program

I think i was already in the $20k hardware.

Just seeing what would be good for Virtualize.

I'd imagine I need a server to hold the hosts and a SAN.
 
You'd want 2 servers for the hosts, and a small NAS. Double your Domain/File box and add a NAS and you should be fine for now (no additional hardware - just 2 of those servers and then the NAS) Then essentials plus for vmotion/HA. If you're worried about CPU much, double the first machine instead. And I'd keep exchange in a physical box for this size.
 
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