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Virtualisation


saint_stevo
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About to embark on a Virtualisation project in the new financial year.

 

Anyone got any experience of it at all? I have played with Virtual P.C for a while and installed ESX on a Compaq Server previously running NT4.0 and altho dog slow (as expected) was quite impressed with that as well.

 

Hyper V is the other product which has caught my eye, but guessing at it is MS it will be over priced and under perform?

 

Any one got any findings or implemented virtualisation previously?

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Love it love it love it

 

Forget MS's product which has resouce overheads that are much more then VM.

 

ESX3 is free at the moment so you can download and play with, although lots of the normal features are withdrawn.

 

Only last week I vmed a server which used to take 30 mins to boot and 4 hours to backup. Now it takes 40 secs to boot and 20 mins to back up. Only problem is backup as you will have to do a normal veritas / arcserve as you cant use the normal utils.

 

It is very expensive but will think we will save £20000 a year on electrcity and £20000 on server contracts.

 

Once you have full blown VM, things are much easier with snap shots, san replciation etc. Best thing ever to happen I think to IT :)

 

If you have any questions fire away

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Love it love it love it

 

Forget MS's product which has resouce overheads that are much more then VM.

 

ESX3 is free at the moment so you can download and play with, although lots of the normal features are withdrawn.

 

Only last week I vmed a server which used to take 30 mins to boot and 4 hours to backup. Now it takes 40 secs to boot and 20 mins to back up. Only problem is backup as you will have to do a normal veritas / arcserve as you cant use the normal utils.

 

It is very expensive but will think we will save £20000 a year on electrcity and £20000 on server contracts.

 

Once you have full blown VM, things are much easier with snap shots, san replciation etc. Best thing ever to happen I think to IT :)

 

If you have any questions fire away

 

Well i have limited knowledge of VMWare really mate, only what a few reps have come in and reeled off as a sales speel and what i have read up.

 

We are going to virtualise 12 or so servers onto 2 boxes, while at the same time implementing a Windows domain (have the domain up and running withing our dept, just needs rolling out to everyone (1000 users, 56 sites and just little old me!!)) and file server to replace our current Novell set-up.

 

As i understand it, if i have 2 VMWare servers each holding 6 Server 2k3 servers, if they work out between them that a couple of servers have not been accessed or used for a period of time or that the requests are low, it can move them all across onto 1 box of active servers and put the other box into 'standby' mode, thus saving power etc? Excuse me if that sounds massively jumbled....

 

What was this you mentioned about backups? Currently have all the servers on my domain and they are backed up to a SAN/NAS using Backup Exec 12.....will this not work through VMWare? have heard iSCSI mentioned for replication, can i implement something with that?!

 

Reading stuff and hearing bits and bobs about it all, it does seem to be quality and will help out with testing patches and service packs etc, especially as we have to conform with certain standards and stuff and prove all patches and SP's are tested before roll out

 

Just want to get a heads up before all this comes to fruition.....

 

 

Cheers

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We back up all our servers to a backup server using Netvault. This is licenced per client so one advantage of using VM is that you may have, for example 4 VM systems on one VM host. So, if you back up the VM host, you're only using 1 client licence.

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Any one got any findings or implemented virtualisation previously?

Yes thanks, I have used MSVS2005, Hyper-V, and VMWare at various times, but more for development servers and test environments and for much smaller business IT infrastructure compared to what you're looking at. How have you been getting on with this since starting the thread? I might have said something sooner however I forgot the techie forum was here until the reshuffle and saw you having a dig at Baj on another thread. I confess I haven't used ESXi yet but everything I've heard and read suggests that would be ideal for you, whereas Hyper-V is just right for us at the moment due to size and licensing.

 

We are going to virtualise 12 or so servers onto 2 boxes, while at the same time implementing a Windows domain (have the domain up and running withing our dept, just needs rolling out to everyone (1000 users, 56 sites and just little old me!!)) and file server to replace our current Novell set-up.

I'm assuming someone's done all the sums and you're confident that you've got enough ram on those 2 boxes for whatever those 12 or so servers are doing? Is the Windows Domain Controller going to be one of those VMs or will that be on a physical box?

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Yes thanks, I have used MSVS2005, Hyper-V, and VMWare at various times, but more for development servers and test environments and for much smaller business IT infrastructure compared to what you're looking at. How have you been getting on with this since starting the thread? I might have said something sooner however I forgot the techie forum was here until the reshuffle and saw you having a dig at Baj on another thread. I confess I haven't used ESXi yet but everything I've heard and read suggests that would be ideal for you, whereas Hyper-V is just right for us at the moment due to size and licensing.

 

 

I'm assuming someone's done all the sums and you're confident that you've got enough ram on those 2 boxes for whatever those 12 or so servers are doing? Is the Windows Domain Controller going to be one of those VMs or will that be on a physical box?

 

We are going 32GB RAM per Box i think, on HP servers. It is still at PId (Prince2) stage at the moment but we have various people coming in talking us through our options etc....but mainly just sodding salesmen. Me have a dig at Baj? Never....

 

We were going to virtualise the D.C. Its currently sat on an old Compaq proliant server which was running NT 4.0 until i butchered it into allowing 2003....

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Stevo,

 

VM ware is probably the best solution but not the cheapest. They also provide a backup solution to for all the VMs although you would need to have something like BE for granualer restore.

 

Citrix are offering Citrix® XenServer for free now as they know the're up against it with Vm ware and Hyper V. Take a look at http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=1687130 definately worth considering if your a SMB.

 

I know you've had enough of sales men but we offer the above if your interested and at least you know me!

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