Jon-Moore.co.uk

Virtualisation seems to be the buzz word when it comes to servers and to be honest, I’m not surprised. The benefits of virtualising your servers are far reaching indeed, the primary and in my opinion, most boring are fairly obvious; your physical boxes are utilised to their maximum potential, you have less machines running so you produce less heat and use less power and you server room has a lot more space.

Now, these are all great things, don’t get me wrong on that, reducing the number of servers needed from 50 to 10 might be reason enough for a large corporation to virtualise, I’m sure the electricity bill saves would be pretty amazing, but what I find really exciting is the resilience it can bring to your organisation. Imagine this, you have six virtual servers running on three physical boxes, it’s the middle of the day, everyone is working hard (or hardly working) and the motherboard fails on the box running exchange and another LOB server, instantly the entire company looses access to emails – MAJOR PANIC ENSUES.

But it’s fine – you log onto virtual machine manager and move the virtual servers to one of the other physical boxes, 10 minutes later everyone is working again and you can have another latte and feel good about how much of an awesome IT Manager/sys admin/tech support guy you are.

To me this sounds like a very good thing, which is why over the next few weeks I’m going to virtualise as many of our servers as I can. Currently I’ve identified seven servers that are prime for the switch, these include two domain controllers, an exchange server, a SQL server, an ISA server (running as an edge firewall… more on this later) and a couple of LOB servers. three of these servers run on pretty powerful boxes so I’m planning to simply beef up their memory and use those as my physical hosts.

My data storage will be taken care of by a Broadberry Cyberstore 316S DSS SAN, this will hold all of the virtual hard drives, I’ve identified this a possible single point of failure, so I’m going to put new, large, hard drives in the physical servers so that if the SAN ever fails I can restore the virtual drives from backups, right onto the physical servers.

For anyone looking to do something similar, I’m going to post up what I go through to get this working… job number one, buy the hardware and the licenses! This will be done on Monday, I’ll let you know how it all goes and give you a progress update on what I’m doing.

I’d love to hear from anyone else doing similar projects like this or anything else I’ve ever talked about on here (love, life, servers, etc) so get in touch!

Laters

Jon