£45k for virtualisation?

[sidewinder]

This isnt really a moan, just wanted to know what others thought of this quote
Our Dell account manager recently changed and theyve been trying to now flog us everything they can, and insisted on this quote despite no-one really asking for it

The hardware side of this cost isnt anything bad, and it does include a 4.4Tb SAN, 2 very powerful servers and a less well specced server for management of it all. Its more the other costs I want to question.
£3k for a virtualisation assesment, and £8k for a VMWare consultancy service. That seems the extravagent bit to me

Plus, the proposal includes getting rid of pretty much all our servers, some which are only a year old!

Ive got nothing against virtualisation, and it is the future in some scenarios. And the SAN is a great idea, I definately think its what we should get here instead of buying more servers with tons of drives

Obviously I know Dell want to flog us all the equipment they can, but Id want to use the 2 newest servers we already have (Dual Core Xeon x2, 8GB RAM) for hosting virtual machines.
And I dunno if this is me thinking a bit backward, but Id always prefer to keep my DC's on physical boxes?

And anyone thats done a big virtualisation project, is it better to do it all in one go like this, or migrate slowly?

[pmassingham]

We have 5 physical servers running 15 VMWare servers. There is no need for a mangement server. VMWare is free. We have 2, 3 TB SANs, RAID 5 and mirrored for full redundancy. Your new servers look OK for part of the task. Cost looks top end. Try some other suppliers. We used ERGO. We migrated the whole lot in one go. ERGO did the whole thing during a summer holiday.

[DMcCoy]

We have 5 physical servers running 15 VMWare servers. There is no need for a mangement server. VMWare is free. We have 2, 3 TB SANs, RAID 5 and mirrored for full redundancy. Your new servers look OK for part of the task. Cost looks top end. Try some other suppliers. We used ERGO. We migrated the whole lot in one go. ERGO did the whole thing during a summer holiday.

You will want a managment server if you are going with ESX, you can virtualise it too, but it makes life easier if you don't. You might also want a backup server that's connected to the san these days.

VMWare server is free, but has limited features. VMWare ESX is not free but has lots of features.

As for the cost, I spent nearly twice that when I virtualised, but prices for ESX, SAN and multi core cpus have really brought the prices down (especially now you don't need dual HBAs with iscsi).

[DMcCoy]

And anyone thats done a big virtualisation project, is it better to do it all in one go like this, or migrate slowly?

Don't do it all in one go. It would be better to trial all the software and hardware first and make sure you are happy with it. Then when you are a phased migration will be easier to do as you will have things like redundancy, backup, templates established from the testing.

One area to watch - power managment. ESX doesn't power off host machines after it halts (usually), not much use if you are shutting down due to aircon failure. This can be solved (with the dells - I assume other vendors are similar) with the openmanage tools, once installed there are some ipmi options that can be editied, one of which is to poweroff when the os halts. Problem solved.

[dhicks]

£3k for a virtualisation assesment, and £8k for a VMWare consultancy service.

Seems a tad on the vague-and-waffly side. You could just buy the two servers and SAN device and install VMWare (or Xen, for free!) yourself.

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David Hicks