Is VMware right for us

DB Cooper

I'm pretty new to VMware, and wanting to know if its right for our company. When I read about the benefits of running VMware, it seems like a no-brainer. But we are a small tribal government, and is it over kill for our infrastructure.

We support 250 users in 8 locations.
Our current servers:
1 2003 Exchange server.
1 DHCP/ and data MS Server 2003
5 Department data servers (2XMS Server2008 and 3xMS Server2003)
3 offsite servers, MS server 2003

Thanks for any feedback.

ITMonkey

Judging from your environment, you are a MS shop. Why not upgrade to Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise or Server 2012 Standard and use the free Hyper-V role that comes with them? By a new server with the money you are saving by not buying vSphere licenses.

petedude

ITMonkey wrote: »

Judging from your environment, you are a MS shop. Why not upgrade to Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise or Server 2012 Standard and use the free Hyper-V role that comes with them? By a new server with the money you are saving by not buying vSphere licenses.

I've heard of many alleged "MS shop" environments running VMWare ESXi.

But then, there's also Citrix XenServer if you want something free.

TheProf

Unfortunately knowing what servers you guys currently have and what you're looking to virtualize is not enough information to determine the best fit hypervisor. You have to consider other factors that might influence your decision.

The main question you want to ask your self, is what are you trying to achieve by going virtual? Is there a particular use case for virtualization in your environment? It's definitely a good idea, but what I am leaning towards, is the end goal and the functionality you're looking to have, what are some of the issues you're trying to address by virtualizing?

Virtualizing has to do with a lot more than just hypervisors, you have to consider storage, networking, servers. Often people forget that by consolidating multiple servers in into one increases the cost of that one main server simply because you have a much greater impact if that server were to go down..

In a small environment, things don't have to be very complicated, but you still need to figure this stuff out, otherwise it's going to be a pain to work with. I would recommend to speak with a consultant so that you can work with him/her on the solution and learn from them, would be very beneficial.

Zartanasaurus

10 servers running a 10 year old operating system. Like TheProf says, what are you looking to get out of it? You could run your entire environment on 2 beefy Hyper-V hosts and use 2 other file servers as SMB shared storage to save on SAN costs. So you could consolidate 7 onsite servers into 4. You should be able to save on OS licensing costs this way so maybe you can justify the acquisition cost, especially if there is a planned hardware upgrade in the future anyway. You'll need to demo it and prove it works to management and yourself though. But with gear that old (presumably), I doubt you have anything that even qualifies to run Server 2012 as a test.

dave330i

It's really depends on your near and long term goals. Are you looking at VDI? How about IaaS? What's your COOP stratagy? etc. The latest VMware & Hyper-V requires 64-bit hardware, so you'll need to upgrade the servers. To get the most out of virtualization, you'll need a SAN at your main site. It can be software or hardware SAN.

Based on your description, it sounds like you only need vSphere Std which is ~$1k/CPU. If you can bring those 3 remote servers to main site, you'll only need vCenter foundation license which is pretty cheap. If you can't centralize those servers, then you'll need vCenter Std license which will cost you more.

Also, have you looked at cloud providers like Terramark, EC2, etc?

DirtySouth

I think the others have nailed the high points. It really comes down to what your goals are, redundancy, DR, replication, power/cooling savings...etc. I will say that no matter what you do, make sure you have multiple ESX hosts in a cluster. Whats the pulse on a budget?