virtual machines?

[alunmjones]

we just got a handout from our support company saying that they would like to move over to virtual machines and server 2008 r2, ive never really used virtual servers befor, had a few basic virtual xp installs for testing but thats as far as it goes.

 

we currently have 2x poweredge SC1430 (2 years old ish), 1x Poweredge T605 (just turnd 1 year) and 1x Poweredge 1600SC (very old) machines.

 

anyone have good advice/pros cons about setting it up, they quoted between £6,000 and £15,000 depending on what we want to go with, with money back for buying our old stuff back.

 

thanks

Alun

[Modey]

we just got a handout from our support company saying that they would like to move over to virtual machines and server 2008 r2, ive never really used virtual servers befor, had a few basic virtual xp installs for testing but thats as far as it goes.

 

we currently have 2x poweredge SC1430 (2 years old ish), 1x Poweredge T605 (just turnd 1 year) and 1x Poweredge 1600SC (very old) machines.

 

anyone have good advice/pros cons about setting it up, they quoted between £6,000 and £15,000 depending on what we want to go with, with money back for buying our old stuff back.

 

thanks

Alun

 

It would be interesting to see a breakdown of the costings and the spec of the new server(s) also. Even 6k sounds a little steep to me for virtualizing 4 servers. That would depend on what they are proposing exactly though.

 

We provided new hardware and virtualized servers for two primary schools (that we support, as well as our own school) last summer. We probably did it a bit on the cheap side for them, but if I recall we only charged about 500 + the cost of the hardware.

 

edit: Come to think, if it did include a San and or costing for VMWare then it could get pricey very quickly. I was basing it on using Hyper-V and no san.

Edited March 4, 2010 by Modey

[tmcd35]

I'd have two questions. Does that price include SAN/NAS storage, probably the best part of £8k depending on spec? And, with 2-year old servers can't you treat them to a memory/processor upgrade and use them as VM hosts?

[Kitkatninja]

It does really depend on what they are quoting for? For instance:

 

Redundancy, what virtual environment they will be implementing, any additional licensing, any new hardware, a new backup solution, etc...

 

For instance,

 

A single server setup

 

New equipment: (what I would call) a new "standard" server to host 4 virtual servers would cost between £2500 - £3000. A cheap-ish SAN about £2500 - £3000 (if the server is not hosting it), licensing/administration tools (dependant on what you go for and what type of licensing you currently have, eg software assusrance from MS), then labour on top of that.

 

With the old equipment, it does depend on the spec and whether or not it can be upgraded, added to that you have to take into consideration the cost of upgrade vs the lenght of warranty left on the server. Is it worth spending £xxxx's amount on a 2 year old server if you only have 1 year left on the warranty?

 

Like Modey said, we've implemented virtualisation at a couple of primary schools, our's included (secondary) and we've kept the prices low, but it does really depend (like we've said) on what they've quoted for and what you go for in the end.

 

-ken

[MRmr]

 

New equipment: (what I would call) a new "standard" server to host 4 virtual servers would cost between £2500 - £3000. A cheap-ish SAN about £2500 - £3000 (if the server is not hosting it), licensing/administration tools (dependant on what you go for and what type of licensing you currently have, eg software assusrance from MS), then labour on top of that.

 

 

-ken

 

What would you recommend for a cheap-ish SAN for around that price ?

 

Thanks

 

MR

[Kitkatninja]

What would you recommend for a cheap-ish SAN for around that price ?

 

Thanks

 

MR

 

Drobo Elite, it's about £2000-£2200 (plus it's VMware ready and can be used with Hyper-V), then buy a few 1 or 2 TB disks to populate it (approx £100-£150 each) and there you go. There's also the IBM System Storage DS3300, again around the £2000 mark.

 

In the new FISCAL, we'll be buying the Drobo Elite to run a couple of servers on. The main bulk of our servers are running virtually on/in the Intel Modular server in the built in SAN and external Promise Storage array.

 

-Ken

[Danlewis3]

My virtulisation cost

 

nas box 2 1tb boxes 2k

server 3.5k

server 2008 and cals 2.5k

 

the server has 6virtual servers running on it.

[Modey]

[whinge mode on]

 

It's happened on quite a few threads I have looked at (and contributed to) recently. The OP asks a question, advice is forthcoming, but then no response from the OP. It's most perturbing!

 

[whinge mode off]

 

Maybe if I answer a post, it's the kiss of death.

[tmcd35]

perturbing!

 

Maybe we're using too meny long words and scaring them off?

[alunmjones]

sorry, been chatting to our suport company about it, and having a look at what funds im getting for the next financial year and what needs doing with sead funds, id like to do this as i can see the benafits of not having any downtime, think this is something to look at in a year or so, two rooms need doing befor i can justify fully changing the way our servers are set up, will probably upgrade our servers to server 2008 r2 tho, our suport company is offering an upgrade for £45 per server.

[Danlewis3]

sorry, been chatting to our suport company about it, and having a look at what funds im getting for the next financial year and what needs doing with sead funds, id like to do this as i can see the benafits of not having any downtime, think this is something to look at in a year or so, two rooms need doing befor i can justify fully changing the way our servers are set up, will probably upgrade our servers to server 2008 r2 tho, our suport company is offering an upgrade for £45 per server.

 

And the rest, as you need new CALS too. for our network of 700 computers it came to about 2.5k for upgrading to 2008r2