What to do hardware wise

[Norphy]

At the moment, we have a SharePoint 2010 farm, a Blackboard Learn farm, a couple of SQL servers, our MIS system, SCOM, our DNS servers, our HR and finance systems, secondary file servers, printer servers, our web servers and our library system running off it. Plus a good chunk of it is running development stuff. At present that little lot is running 44 virtual machines of varying spec.

[FragglePete]

We run ours using XenServer, all with local storage as a the initial outlay for a decent SAN is out of reach for us at the mo. But, I've got 12 virtual servers running across three physical boxes running XenServer - one has a DAS unit attached to provide additional storage.

The physical machines running on HP Proliant DL380's (from G6 - G8 generations). Xen running on a couple of 15K Drivers at RAID1 and the VMs on an RAID5 array of 10K disks.

Took the brave step of moving our SIMS onto a VM this year and its been running very well.

Would like to get things onto a SAN in the future to make it a bit more flexibile but out current setup done over a 3 year period is working quite nicely.

Pete

[garethedmondson]

Well we have no funds for huge expensive systems so are going to purchase this http://www.ict-direct.co.uk/servers?...&category_id=8 from John and cut our virtualisation teeth with it.

It is coming with rails and the hotplug bays - hopefully order tomorrow.

It will do as we learn what we are doing.

Gareth

[3s-gtech]

Well we have no funds for huge expensive systems so are going to purchase this http://www.ict-direct.co.uk/servers?...&category_id=8 from John and cut our virtualisation teeth with it.

It is coming with rails and the hotplug bays - hopefully order tomorrow.

It will do as we learn what we are doing.

Gareth

I bought one of these when they were new, for running SIMS. Aside from now running S2008R2 and 8GB of RAM, it has not been altered in over four years, and has been superb. Just mind that the SATA drives are slow for many applications - a pair of SSDs may be a nice upgrade (though I'm not 100% it'll support SATA 2.0, you may be able to stuff a PCI-E SATA 3.0 card in there )

[garethedmondson]

I bought one of these when they were new, for running SIMS. Aside from now running S2008R2 and 8GB of RAM, it has not been altered in over four years, and has been superb. Just mind that the SATA drives are slow for many applications - a pair of SSDs may be a nice upgrade (though I'm not 100% it'll support SATA 2.0, you may be able to stuff a PCI-E SATA 3.0 card in there )

Your comments are interesting. Am I therefore better off purchasing:

http://www.ict-direct.co.uk/servers?...&category_id=8

And fit in it 2 x 146 SCSI drives at 15K?

If I mirror these in the same way? It's only 2 x dual core - will it be okay for simple servers being virtualised? I assume the 8 GB of ram will help.

Gareth