Complete NEW 2008 R2 install

I have been running VMWare ESXi with a couple NexentaStor homebrew SAN servers - it works fantastic apart from the fileserver seems to put a huge load with the high IO on it - everything was VMs...

I've decided that due to huge number of conflicting GPOs in my current 2003 r2 domain that it would be easier for me to completely rebuild the whol lot as part of my LEAs server refresh project and invested in a couple of HP G7 AMD servers and a SAN box - its the live migration and failover that i'm most interested in...

Basically i'm going to try and iliminate as much as a possibly can for single point of failure... hopefully next year i'll get a second san and set them up clustered too... - just not enough cash this time around! The DPM servers are going to be physical servers - one offsite and one in another part of the school... or both in different parts of the school. i have looked at Xen but i was recommended to go with Hyper-V as the support contract costs wil be significantly lower wth it rather than the Xen solution... CPU and RAM usage isn't one of my worries atm as the 2 servers i bought have 24x 2.2GHZ and 32GB RAM each... plus with the backup of my older G5 servers that are 4x 2.6 and 32GB RAM... the san is a 10x 1TB unit in a RAID5 array... backed up on 2 DPM servers... then onto tape (LTO2).

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Originally Posted by Richie_OLSJ

I'd say stick with Hyper-V and don't bother with VMWare (may be a good product, but is unnecessary complexity and very expensive, whereas Hyper-V is free with Windows).

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VMware is about as simple as virtualisation comes, hyper-vs more advanced stuff is where you suddenly get chucked in to the "unnecessary complexity" everythings just self explanitary and straight forward with VMware. (the only difficulty with VMware is getting their licensing team to do there job without it taking a month to sort out a simple upgrade of one license!)

From a practical point - I would include at least one x32 server. Why? Well most stations will be x32 OS and beleive me, x64 servers are a complete pain in the rear when it comes to print server duties. The x64 servers have x64 printer drivers built into them, which is fair enough. Whilst you can add x32 print drivers manually (to support your stations), it can be a complete nightmare trying to find x32 drivers for some printers - you can end up spending hours trying to source drivers for some oler legacey printers.

I've just standardised all the printers to 3 types across the school but i agree on having a seperate ps instead of hosting it on the primary dc as it is now...