Thread: Virtualization

Originally Posted by seraphim

Rolling out new production environments, like Exchange 2007 or SAP or SharePoint on VMs is neat, but will require some serious horsepower. You can setup a weaker VM Host, which is a cheap 2way 2CPU Dell385 to host your legacy applications that just aren't going away. I know a lot of companies still have some bogus foxpro and asp1.1 apps that just can't go away because department Y needs it to assign sprockets for department Z's gizmo. Virtualize all those crap application servers onto a cheap new Host, which is still going to be faster and better than the 2000 era design it is currently hosted on.

Once I worked on a project where we simply could not make Novell run well on ESX and had to opt for physical server instead. Some 16bit legacy app was running so bad, even VMware gave up after weeks of perf analysis and we had to roll-back and admit we can't make it work to the customer. So there's always a possibility you won't be able to virtualize everything you are planning to.

Originally Posted by seraphim

It shouldn't be difficult to understand why I'd defend EMCs products, but I'm not in love with them either. As a SharePoint guy, I don't really care where you stick your SQL data, just as long as it's reliable and performant. Luckily, my friends down the hall have a $250k piece of hardware, with th $50k/yr for 5 years support contract, that meets those requirements!

I see your 250K and raise you a maxed out IBM DS8100 (damn, no poker smiley).

Originally Posted by seraphim

... They all feed into each other pretty well, and the job only becomes difficult when we have to decide if we want 2 or 3 flat panel monitors for our desktop PCs.

Always order more than you need. Like my laptop AC adapters - one at home, one at work, one in my backpack and one in reserve. A bit hard to follow this approach with some serious hardware but you should at least try