Virtualization for a Small Business?

[ntco]

Hello All,

I have been reading up on vmware and I'm considering utilizing ESXi in our office. We are a small operation (25 users) currently using a single NetWare 6.5 server for file sharing and our MAS 90 accounting database.

I would like to move away from NetWare, and possibly use Novell OES2 instead. I would also like to have a dedicated server (either Windows or OES) for MAS90 so everything is not running on the same server.

Cost-wise, it's tempting to just throw some extra memory into our existing server (only 2 years old), install vmware ESXi, and have both servers running on the same machine. I've accomplished this with a test server and it seems to work OK. Additionally, I think an in-house web server and ftp server would be useful in the future. The ability to take snapshots of VMs and the flexibility of virtualization is very appealing too.

On the other hand, I understand that virtualization makes more sense on a larger scale with datacenters and dozens/hundreds of servers, which is a level we're not even approaching at this point.

My question is, does it make sense to use virtualization on our scale? Would I just be introducing potential problems with little added benefit?

Is there any one else in a similar situation who's using vmware?

Any advice/suggestions you could offer would be great.

Thanks!

 

[nhidalgo]

not sure it is worth it for two servers. Do you other servers to virtualize. Email/ domain controllers.

Nick

 

[jmd0252]

You really should have a fairly decent budget in place. I think eventually you will do a SAN,, and have pretty "muscular" machines that run the VMs. We run ESX server, and then Windows on top for the different servers we want. You might want to check on the MAS90, if it runs SQL, see if they have any recomendations for running SQL on a VM. Right now you have a small number of clients to support, but if you anticipate very much growth,, that would be one thing I check to make sure the performance remains, at the top.

 

[jpm121]

I have to disagree with jmd, small businesses are excellent choices for ESXi. There is no need to buy a SAN or even very expensive servers. An office with 25 users is not going to come close to taxing the resources of decent hardware even running a half dozen VMs.

Be sure to considering the following: you need to be sure that your server hardware is compatible with ESXi, including network, storage, etc. Also, be sure to consider how you are going to handle backups. Your notion of snapshots isn't a particularly good way to do that, with a small number of servers I'd suggest sticking with regular server-based backups if possible (i.e. Backup Exec w/ agents).

 

[ntco]

Thanks for all the great feedback. I'm still on the fence about the issue. For the moment, we're probably going to stick with 2 physical servers. Also, we do not anticipate any real growth in the near future, so probably no more than our 25 clients for a while.

In addition to the OES and Windows servers, I feel we could make use of 1 web server (for in house applications) and 1 FTP server.

And yes, I would make sure and implement a real backup solution and not rely on snapshots exclusively.

My main reason for leaning towards this is because I really like the notion of decoupling the server software from the hardware. It makes future upgrades/migrations so much easier. And, if we did unexpectedly need more servers, our infrastructure would be ready to handle it.

Alternatively, I was considering using 2 physical machines, 1 with OES, which can include a Xen hypervisor, and 1 with Windows Server 2008, which has Hyper-V. That way, I would have my 2 main servers running on the physical machines, but have the flexibility of adding additional VMs onto either one. It's not quite as slick as the VMware setup, but it might be a good intermediate solution. Any thoughts?

Thanks!

 

[jpm121]

Not sure what OES is, at least in this context?

The thing to be aware of is that hypervisors (ESX, Hyper-V, Xen) are all bare-metal systems, meaning that they are installed first. You don't have a choice of "install Windows now and add on Hyper-V later". You would need to backup your Windows server, wipe it out, install Hyper-V, then create a VM for your windows server and restore it into a VM running under Hyper-V.

So while it's possible to re-purpose the hardware down the road, you aren't really going to want to, and it's not as easy as you describe.

 

[ntco]

OES = Novell Open Enterprise Server .

At the moment we only have 1 server running NetWare 6.5. I want to ditch NetWare and use OES in its place. We would also buy an additional machine as the Windows server. So, both machines would be set up from scratch.

Since I would be setting up both machines from scratch, I would have the opportunity to install the hypervisors at the time of install.

From my understanding, the hypervisors utilized by Microsoft and Novell are a bit different from the bare metal ones like ESXi, in that they run off the host OS. That way, the main OS (Win Server 2008 or OES) is installed like a normal OS, but it can also house additional VMs. I thought this would be a good compromise between a fully virtualized and a "normal" server configuration.

 

[ArizonaGeek]

I am going to agree with JPM121, with such a small environment 2 servers with enough disk space should work just fine. You can use something like Veeam or Vizioncore for backing up your VMs, and the cost is relatively reasonable.

I think if you had a bare metal install of ESXi installed first you could P2V the other machines and then re-purpose them for ESXi. There is always a way.

For our development environment, I have a single Dell PE 2950 with 16 gigs of RAM, five 73 gig SAS drives and a MD1000 SAS DAS full of 300 gig SAS drives so we have about 7 TB of drive space for a cost of less than $7,000. I also have a seperate Dell PE 2950 with 16 gigs of RAM and five 300 gig SAS drives. So with two servers and a TON of storage I can easily get 20 virtual servers, if I increase the RAM I could get double that. I have all the space and computer I need right now.

Just my thoughts. Good luck!

Cheers
Rob

The answer is always "PEBKAC!