Question : Virtual Server Hardware recommendations needed

500 Points.

We are a small business software development and application service provider.   We have yet to dive into the Virtual Server world but think now may be the time, now mostly because we a new project requiring us to set up a new MS SQL 2008 server running W2K8 R2 STD.  

So my question is to ask for recommendations on how an established small business moves to Virtual.

We currently have the following physical servers:

1)  W2K3 Std, MS SQL 2000.  Fair amount of load.  Clients access data from our Web Server.
2)  W2K3 Std, IIS 6.0, Webserver, hosting about 20 sites, one is fairly busy, 1000 visitors per week, hitting the SQL server in #1.
3)  W2K3 Std, Terminal Server, average 5 clients at any given time, only one application is used, hitting the SQL Server in #1.
4)  W2K3 Std, Domain controller.   We also have a 2nd physical Domain controller which I guess is like the Backup, but I don't think they are regarded a primary & backup DCs like in the old days.

All servers are Dell PowerEdge towers, single CPUs, 2 Gigs Ram each, nothing fancy.


Ok, should we go out and buy the biggest Dell server we can find, and start down the Virtual Server path?   Does this server have multiple CPUs, how many?     Does this server have multiple NICs, how many?  How much Ram?   Can one Virtual host box really support all of our existing physical servers?   Latency would be a problem for us.     That said, any specific Dell server hardware models fit us?

Is it hard to do a migration from existing physical servers to the Virtual?  Or will we have to rebuild from scratch?  Especially for the Web Server and Terminal Server, the rebuilding process will take weeks, trying to remember all of the configuration tweaks and all, we're not looking forward to having to do that.

We're fairly comfortable with the individual physical servers, but feel we have to investigate at this
time.  

All comments are greatly appreciated!
Thanks,  John  

Answer : Virtual Server Hardware recommendations needed

Yes, a single mid-range server would be more then enough to replace your old servers. Just get as much RAM as you can, for CPU i would not worry, a normal quad-core would do the the trick.

You don't mention your storage needs, how big is your storage now? if you are serious into virtualisation, a SAN is recommended. But for your setup, you can do with local SAS disk i think, depending on load. For your enviroment, I believe that storage performance would be the bottleneck here, not CPU/RAM.

Also, you don't specify which virtual system you will use, VMWare (ESXi is free, ESX costs money, VMWare Server is free but very old), Hyper-V ?

Both VMWare and Hyper-V supports VLAN's, so basically you are just creating a VLAN trunk into one NIC on the server and let the virtualisation software do the rest. And yes, all servers today comes with at least 2 nics, you can always add more later of course.