Koldov Posted January 31, 2022 Posted January 31, 2022 Well, not really sure where to post this... We have 2 fairly old servers and zero budget to replace them, but as 2012R2 nears EOL next year (Oct 10, 2023?), I'm not sure what to do? Anyway, current spec is pretty low (and old, did I mention that?), but they have always been rock solid (apart from a couple of disk failures) and as we are a small Primary they haven't exactly seen a lot of action... Server 1 (DELL PowerEdge T420): DC, SIMS (SQL 2014), File Storage... Processor - Intel® Xeon® CPU E5-2440 v2 @ 1.90GHz, 1900 Mhz, 8 Core(s), 16 Logical Processor(s) RAM - 32GB Storage - 2 x 300GB 15K SAS Hard Drives (RAID 1), 4 x 600GB SAS 15K SAS Hard Drives (RAID 10) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Server 2 (DELL PowerEdge T610): DC, WSUS, VM HOST (for Print Server)... Processor - 2 x Intel® Xeon® CPU E5620 @ 2.40GHz, 2394 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s) RAM - 24 GB Storage - 2 x 146GB 15K SAS Hard Drives (RAID 1), 2 x 1TB 7200RPM SAS Hard Drives (RAID 1) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I don't want to do a lot of work for the sake of it (no real improvement in services) and I'm a bit concerned that as things run pretty sweet here, I will be making a fair amount of work for myself for very little return (in terms of extra storage space, speed of the network or productivity)... There isn't much wiggle room to have any kind of disruption to T&L or the network or server availability (and I pretty much only work term time)... But, things move on (not that I want or need to keep up with the latest and greatest) and I know that there will come a time when I pretty much have to jump! So, for 'Server 1' as far as upgrades go I guess OS and SQL (for SIMS) are the big ones and I'm considering in-place... Then what to do about just having the servers as hosts and knocking out VMs all over the show for various roles (but SIMS on a VM?), . I know 'Server 2' might struggle with those disks (it was set-up before I started here), WSUS doesn't exactly struggle as it's pretty streamlined (with minimum 'products' and only a few clients), but to be fair apart from the Print Server VM, it's not exactly doing much else... What I can see as a benefit (as many point out) is VMs for backup in case of disaster recovery from HW failure (getting more likely with each passing year) or Virus/Malware infection, so maybe worth it just for that.
mavhc Posted January 31, 2022 Posted January 31, 2022 I bought some better cpus and more ram from ICT Direct, and got 3 1TB Intel D3-S4510 per server. If you buy a new server, can reuse the SSDs. Installed Proxmox as a raidz1 booting off the 3 ssds, then moved/converted the existing VMs to run on KVM. Now I have hourly snapshots that backup to a random old computer I had lying around I filled with HDDs. And you can only delete the backups if you have physical access to the server room, so should prevent paying ransoms The slightly tricky part for you would be Physical 2 Virtual the existing servers, but if it all goes wrong, just plug the old drives back in and try again another day. I'd scrap WSUS at this point unless your internet is still from the 90s. There's no speed difference between VM and bare metal these days because there's hardware support for VMs in all non ancient CPUs. Once that was stable I took a snapshot, then upgraded Server 2012r2 to Server 2019 (Will go to 2022 at some point), again if it fails, rollback. 1
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