Vitual Servers vs Std Ones

[swiftysw1]

Hi,

We have 4 Std Widows 2008 'Vanilla' Servers.

1 of which is our current Sims Server..

 

Every time they need replacing it cost us (£11000) (Every 5/6 Years)

 

One of our Admins is bleating about visualisation...

 

Can I have some Pros and Cons pls including prices.

 

Thanks

S

[Stuclark]

I'm not going to do prices as that's a very complicated issue; but in terms of why virtualise or use physical servers:

 

Presuming you have more than one physical host, virtualised servers will benefit from some redundancy

Presuming you have enough horsepower in your physical hosts, you can create way more virtual servers than you'd have physical space for in your server room

Virtualising servers (where the number of virtual servers is higher than the number of physical servers hosting them) reduces the power consumption, space needed, & electrical consumption of the server room

Virtualising servers makes better (more efficient) use of your physical hardware.

 

However ...

To virtualise "well" you need some very powerful host servers, so the cost of buying those (and you'll still need to upgrade them every 3/4/5 years) may well outstrip the cost of buying less powerful physical servers.

You'll also need a SAN to "properly" virtualise your environment. You'll then need to upgrade that 3/4/5 yearly too.

[maniac]

The simple argument is that a majority of servers are well underutilised for a majority of the time so by hosting multiple servers within one physical host you are making better use of the resources available to you. It also allows you to be much more granular with your servers so I have dedicated appliances for most items. I have 25 servers in my virtual infrastructure, I don't need that many but each service I have I tend to put on a dedicated server, so for example WSUS has a dedicated server, AV management is a dedicated server, Finance is a dedicated server etc. because under the datacentre licenses you can buy on EES you can run as many servers as you like per appliance you have brought a data centre license for. also makes deployment much easier, I can deploy a new server from a template in just a few minutes which is dead handy, I can also extend the storage available to any server, memory available, processing time available etc. all with a few clicks and monitor the whole thing quite effectively from the management console so I can get a good idea of how much our system is actually being utilised. Put quite simply for any medium to large organisation I wouldn't consider anything else.

 

However, you say you only have 4 hosts so a full on virtualisation platform with SAN is probably a bit overkill, however you might be better off with an appliance like this Integrum | Servers | Stone Group which is effective for organisations wishing to take advantage of virtualisation on a smaller scale.

[tmcd35]

Virtualistion is about decoupling software from hardware. A traditional server is tied to its hardware, upgrading the underlying hardware is difficult and involves significant down time. In a virtualised environment upgrading the hardware should have minimal effect on the software and require little or (depending on the environment) no down time.

 

Virtualisation also allows you to split server roles into their own servers rather than consolidating several servers in one system. A common traditional example might be to have Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, and your Print Service all on one server. Or possibly worse, your file and print services on the same physical server. What happens when a new print driver requires a server restart....

 

Virtualisation and splitting file, print, DNS, AD, etc in to their own virtual servers solves this problem.

 

Costs depend greatly on your exiting environment, what you project your VM requirements to be, and the architecture you choose to virtualise around. This thread may give you some ideas where the OP as £20k for a 1100 pupil school: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/hardware/151279-how-do-you-spec-server-2.html#post1296461

[dobsonl]

One thing that might be worth looking at is a Dell PowerEdge VRTX, this is a box that can hold upto 4 nodes and has a shared storage built into it - its a hefty outlay to begin with as others have said for visualization, but we are heading down the VRTX root to start our process off as we can certainty not afford the amount for a SAN & hosts & infrastructure required.

[Ephelyon]

Another option for a converged solution would be the Stone Integrum.

[Stone_Charli]

Thanks @maniac and @Ephelyon!

@swiftysw1, if you're interested in getting a quote for the Integrum, drop me a PM with your details and I'll put you in touch with an account manager