Yeah, I've been configuring a Dell server and have included a 1GB SD module to run ESXi. The only problem is, I've never used it - the only vmware product I've used is the bog standard server that runs in linux.

I've been doing a bit of research though and this ESXi system definitely looks like the way to go. I'm going to see if I can install it on my PC and have a little play - hopefully it's compatible. If I can get away with not bothering with the additional tools then I will do, I suspect I probably can - seeing as this is going to be the only physical machine and it's a pretty straightforward setup.





How do you know what hardware you need? I've pretty much guessed, and erred very much on the side of caution.

Current Spec:

Dell PowerEdge R710

2x Xeon E5520 2.26GHz 1066MHz bus (all three current servers are 2.8GHz P4s)
8GB DDR3 Memory 1066MHz (currently web and mail have 512MB and database has 1GB)
3 x 73GB 10k HDDs in RAID 5 (doubles current storage capacity)
Redundant PSU
1 Embedded Gigabit Ethernet NIC
1 Dual port Gigabit Ethernet NIC
Internal SD Module and 1GB card

I think I've overcooked it on the hardware side, but I've not been given a budget to stick to so I don't see a problem with that spec. It should be absolutely lightening quick.

Also added ESXi 3.5 foundation and a four year subscription. I'm going to do some research to see if I can save ~£1k by doing away with the subscription.

Total cost: £5084

Personally I would always go for 2 smaller servers rather than one larger one and load balance ( even if it is only round robin on the DNS ) them to provide basic resilience.

But that just me.

Personally I'd ditch the SD card as it's too slow & run from HDD.

Go for 12GB RAM (as the E55xx series have triple channel memory controllers)

Spec Intel network controllers (as the Dell Broadcom ones are rubbish).

Make sure you've got a decent RAID card with battery backup & dedicated memory & not onboard

Up the disks to 15k

Get the 3 year 4 hour response warranty

You can never overcook a server as the client needs it to last for 3 years & will expect it to do 10x what they've asked it to do.

Unfortunately that's not an option - it's a requirement that all three servers be consolidated onto one machine.


Are you sure? ESXi is only 32MB - once it's booted it will just sit in memory, and run fast as sh*t, surely?

Very sure, especially as SD cards have a limited write cycle. What happens when the card goes bad & you've got no OS to boot the drives?
There's a lot of read/write with the hypervisor talking to the virtual machines.
Any OS drive should be mirrored at a minimum.

In that case there should be a sign off from the client that they understand and accept the increase risk due to that decision. Its called an arse covering document.

That's pretty much what we do It's rare that there will be anything concrete in what we need when mapped to spec. The only ones you can be certainish of are disk space and RAM. One of the nice things about virtualistion is that you can change the spec with little more than a reboot.



I wouldn't loose the VMware support it could prove to be a very false economy. If you need to save some money, you could loose a CPU and maybe a bit of RAM quite easily, both can be added later on.

I don't know the full details of the scenario, but does the business have existing racks to use? If not a pedestal server maybe the best bet.

Have you considered backups yet? Adding virtual servers to the mix can complicate things.

Cheers for the input so far guys I've settled on VMWare ESXi and Virtual Infrastructure Client to manage it. 12GB memory and opted for one X5570. Chose to only include one CPU so I can bang on about scalability. Also managed to include that in an ideal world they'd buy two servers, use VMWare vCenter to manage them and get uber redundancy plus the ability to scale out rather than up. Anyway...

I'm at the stage where I have to spec the VMs. I know they are all going to be far more powerful than perhaps they need to be, but was just wondering about relative resource levels. I've got to spec up three servers:

Web server for 100 users of intranet and company website.
E-mail server for 100 users
Database server for 28 users (and i assume web server).

How would you order them in terms of relative hardware resources? I think:

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

1GB NICs across the board, and none of them will be short of resources, that's for sure. Just want to make sure I get the balance right.

What do you think?

What email system?

You need fast disks for DB's, try raiding some virtual disks in RAID 5.

I usually setup servers with mirrored OS drives & RAID 5 data. It's usually fast enough.

Does the intranet have data stored on it (like sharepoint) or is it just an information site?

Are you just imaging the existing machines or starting from scratch & migrating the data?

another question - the web site is it static web pages or dynamic?

are you allocating cores?
You've only got 4 real ones to play with & email & DB would like 2 each (minimum if it's SQL & Exchange)

I suppose the question has to be if you are using Win Server, Exchange , SQL server, MS Office why aren't you using share point for Intranet.........

What authentication service are you using AD?

Where is the AV sitting?

What are you using for web statistics?

Anyone else having trouble posting in this thread? I keep trying to post my response but I get an SQL error?

::edit

That worked, so perhaps it's something in my post?

Okay I get the same error every time:



Always the same, even if I change the content slightly - ie add a character at the start, would think that would change the number. Oh well. :'(

What I'm trying to post
The result

I'm running some seriously busy web sites off a pair of these virtual servers.

2 x 2.4GHz vProcessor
2GB vRAM
141GB Shared storage, configured as follows:
C: | OS | 20GB
E: | Data | 120GB
L: | Logs | 1GB
Microsoft Windows 2003 Standard Edition (32bit)

I seem to remember Oracle recommending against RAID 5 because of its poor write speeds. RAID 10 or similar would be better.

Nick which DB are you using?

FWIW our Oracle DBA told me that Oracle don't support VMs, he could be wrong though!