As far as I concerned the DB server and the exchange server are left as physical servers using SAN storage.

You can virtualise anything else within reason.

Sorry about the weird use of an image - the forum is still being fussy. Not too sure why, but meh.

Sorry it doesn't make sense.

It states that everything has to be virtualised ( not a good idea, some things are better left as physical servers ) onto 1 server ( very bad idea ).

It also goes on to say that redundancy and resilience are of the utmost importance.

Well you can't have that whilst putting everything on the same hardware server as you are creating a single point of failure................

True but I'd probably then spec up a 2nd identical setup & mirror the 2 systems with failover setup. Would probably need to implement a SAN for the storage though.

Totally agree but the requirement is for 1 single server, buggered

Could it be stretched to a single C class blade array? It's still be one box (but a very expensive one).

The customer would be better off just replacing the 3 servers by the looks of things (you could use the spare capacity on each server for failover).

Don't forget to add an extra hard drive for hot spare.

I absolutely agree, but I've got to keep to the spec given.



I have mentioned in my assignment that the best option would have been two ESXi servers managed by vCenter to get HA and DRS to improve performance and provide true redundancy. If it hadn't said only one physical machine can be used then I certainly would have specced a vCenter based system. I thought about speccing vCenter anyway, just with the one machine so that future expansion could be easier but I have settled on VI Client instead.

I don't feel as though I can spec a SAN, as that would require additional hardware. That could be considered going against the spec and lose me some marks.

So what do you think of the following, as a general rule of thumb?

DB: Massive CPU, big RAM, big disk
E-mail: Not much CPU, lots of RAM, massive disk
Web: Big CPU, medium RAM, medium disk

Depends on the software used, do you have the specs from the current physical machines?

I'd allocate the following:

2x cores to DB, 4GB RAM, 10x the amout of space the DB requires min
2x cores to Email, 4GB RAM + 100GB space (providing email is using Exchange 2003 or similar)
2x cores to web, 2GB RAM + 20GB space

You may want to add the extra CPU & RAM so you could assign 2x physical cores to each server + 2x logical cores as well.

Well I've settled on using reservations as shown below:

Web
RAM: 2GB
CPU 1 x 2GHz

DB:
RAM: 5GB
CPU: 2 x 2.5GHz

E-mail:
RAM: 3GB
CPU: 2 x 1.5GHz

Disk wise, web has 150GB. DB has 350GB and E-mail has 400GB.

Can I ask how you intend fulfilling this requirement?

Exchange 2007 requires 4GB RAM minimum (in case that's the mail server) & a dual processor.

I thought you only put in 73GB drives?

Well, the best I can do is dual PSUs, RAID 5 storage and redundant switching with STP in the network.

I have said that it's not a truly redundant system, and to achieve that would require an additional server and vCentre.

I don't think I can do any more than that, really.



I've changed my spec now. I've now got just one CPU - x5570 a quad 2.93 zeon and 3x450GB 15k HDDs.

I didn't know about Exchange 2007s requirements - I'll spec the minimum requirements lol thanks for the heads up.

That should cover your arse on it. It rpoves you are aware of it and have thought about it.

one cpu is fine as long as you can give it 2 cores

I have. It's got 2 x 1.5GHz.