Information Systems:Server Virtualization Planning

Documentation

The following is list of vendor whitepapers and datasheets relevant to this project, which provide very clear information. Vendor reps may be able to provide additional information.

Early Considerations

Windows Server licensing

See whitepaper above

• Datacenter is very expensive, but entitles us to unlimited virtual instances on a single machine with two processors.
• Standard edition allows for 2 virtual instances
  • Worth checking to see if our Standard licenses can each convert to two virtual licenses.

Hardware

• 2 hosts
• 10-14 core processors most ideal
• SAN - this will be a major decision
  • Shared storage is not required for vMotion - which is being able to migrate a virtual machine to another server.
  • Shared storage, however, is required for high availability i.e. seamless machine failover
    • This would be a nice thing to have, but our servers don't need this kind of 100% uptime. Or rather, the ones that do will not be virtualized.
  • SANs are very expensive, but if we do consider one, there is a little relief in the fact that we won't need a huge amount of GB for each virtual machine.

VMware vSphere

For clarity:

• vSphere is the virtualization software package
  • ESX/ESXi is the hypervisor
  • vMotion, vCenter are features of vSphere

• There are two main licensing categories: Essentials and Operations Management

This is another major decision that has a significant impact going forward

• • Essentials entitles you to three hosts, or 6 CPUs, but you will not be able to expand beyond this without practically purchasing a new license altogether.
  • Essentials Plus (which is what we would consider if we went the Essentials route), entitles us to vMotion.