Virtualization - servers & desktops

[cava83]

Hi guys,

Done a search on the forum and have seen some good threads/posts, mainly from around 2007/2008.

There has been a lot of development since then and wanted to see if you still thought VMWARE where the market leaders and your thoughts on the technology.

We don't really need it at the moment but our infrastructure will most likely change in the next 12 months or so I am trying to future proof it as much as possible now instead of doing it all at the last minute.

I am looking to do two things, first consolidate a small amount of servers (10) on our main site and secondly, looking to virtualise 10 desktops for testing purposes and then expand from there.

We are small 150 employees. 5 sites.

All our applications including exchange is currently hosted for us (citrix) via a third party company but we currently have 10 employees who use local apps/exchange.

Any thoughts really appreciated or general comments.

There is a large amount of data out there regarding this, but nothing is better than people which have actually done it, even the VM website can be rather confusing.

Licensing for MS is also a pain in the ass.

Thanks,

Gabi.

 

[young_lew]

At my old company we had a little dab into virtualisation.

We looked at MS Hyper-V and for small setups I thought it was good, I had one physical machine running 4 servers and 2 hosts.

Then we had a product demonstration by VmWare and my jaw was on the floor! Their high availability system was very impressive.

It uses 2 or 3 physical machines and if a physical machine goes down it will switch the VM's from that physical machine to another physical machine. If I hadn't seen it for myself I wouldnt have believed it but when the VM was switched it only dropped one ping!

It was a pretty expensive solution though, was in the region of £50,000

 

[cava83]

Do you know if you looked at 3.5 or 4.0?

The pricing is kind of confusing and there are so many versions on 4.0

They do it per CPU incrementals now instead of x2 and there are specific SMB products, but then you need to buy add ons, a tad annoying but hey.

50k is a lot of money, a huge amount of money really. Depends on what that provides though.

Thanks,

G.

 

[Cookie]

We have vSphere up the ying yang here

Lots and lots and lots of money invested

 

[young_lew]

Do you know if you looked at 3.5 or 4.0?

The pricing is kind of confusing and there are so many versions on 4.0

They do it per CPU incrementals now instead of x2 and there are specific SMB products, but then you need to buy add ons, a tad annoying but hey.

50k is a lot of money, a huge amount of money really. Depends on what that provides though.

Thanks,

G.

I believe it was version 4, and you're right they do have lots of different solutions which all vary slightly.

The 50k setup included 3 physical machines, NAS Storage and the setup of 3 VMs - Exchange 2007, Sharepoint 2007/2010 (if 2010 was out by the time we came to implementing the solution) and a SQL server.

The plan was to virtualise all out main servers, but to begin with those were the 3 servers which needed high availability

 

[The Hoff]

A cheaper (better) solution for you as a small enterprise would be Xenserver from Citrix, especially given you mention having some Citrix technology in place atm. It's a good product.

 

[cava83]

Thanks

Well, Citrix is hosted so it's not something I manage myself, nevertheless, I am more familiar with their infrastructure.

Do you use this yourself?

A cheaper (better) solution for you as a small enterprise would be Xenserver from Citrix, especially given you mention having some Citrix technology in place atm. It's a good product.

 

[cava83]

I see,

How many hosts and guests do you have, does the cost also include the MS OS licenses or you just basing this on the VMWARE cost?

Do you feel the cost was worthwhile?

We have vSphere up the ying yang here

Lots and lots and lots of money invested

 

[Cookie]

I've got nothing to do with VMWare here, so I've no idea about licence costs, sorry

All I do is break the VM's

 

[The Hoff]

Thanks

Well, Citrix is hosted so it's not something I manage myself, nevertheless, I am more familiar with their infrastructure.

Do you use this yourself?

Yeah, my old place use VMWare and Xenserver, the capture process is the same (Xenconvert), the console is easy to manage (as is VMWare) and the features available are up there with VMWare's.

You can try it for free here: http://citrix.com/xenserver

 

[cava83]

Did you guys use XenDesktop?

Yeah, my old place use VMWare and Xenserver, the capture process is the same (Xenconvert), the console is easy to manage (as is VMWare) and the features available are up there with VMWare's.

You can try it for free here: http://citrix.com/xenserver