Interested on people's opinions to this proposed server infrastructure solution

[trevorh13]

We are an IT Training Company with a maximum of around 100 users. Main workload is image deployment (via Ghost) with relatively light file and print sharing. Network is Gigabit throughout. We currently have four servers running with SATA Raid 5 (4 disk arrays), 4 GB of RAM. They are 5 years old and we are looking to replace them. Existing infrastructure is as follows:-

Servers 1 and 2
AD-DS
DNS
DHCP
File and print sharing

Server 3
Image Deployment via Ghost

Server 4
DFS replica of Server 3 Image file share

Our current proposal is to consolidate the four physical servers into two with Microsoft Hyper-V as follows:-

Server 1
2x Virtual Machines
Vm1 – Image Deployment
Vm2 – File and print sharing, AD-DS, DNS and DHCP

Server 2
2x Virtual Machines
Vm3 – Image Deployment (DFS replica of the image share on VM1)
Vm4 – File share (DFS replica of file shares on Vm2) AD-DS, DNS and DHCP fail over

In terms of hard disk space we are thinking 2TB (RAID10 possibly?)and each VM to be bound to its own network Card.
Our primary reasoning for Hyper-V is the ability to move VMs to other machines easier migration in the future. We are not looking to make use of Live Migration features at this time.

Am really seeking opinion\insight from people who have maybe deployed something similar. Particularly interested in whether people would recommend SATA or SAS?

 

[jkupski]

If you've got enough imaging going on that you actually have a pair of servers pushing the data, I'm going to guess that you probably want 10k+ SAS drives in this application--especially if you plan to add VMs to these hosts in the future (and given that your workload is negligible in terms of CPU and memory usage, why not?)

Unless the two imaging servers are on different subnets, in different buildings, etc?

 

[itsp1965]

At bit off topic; a I am assuming if you are doing a lot of desktop imaging have you considered going with virtualized desktops instead?