After several months of planning and working out a plan for our company to make a move towards virtualization the PO's were signed and hardware is being ordered. The main server was ordered today along with our VMware licenses. A SAN is ready to be ordered - just have to cross paths with our local vendor to get those final details worked out.
We are moving ahead slowly and won't be taking full advantage of all that VMware has to offer. The primary goal is server consolidation at this point. The savings we get from knocking out a few of our underutlized servers should make management a little more open to further VMware investments with a Phase II hopefully coming next year. Phase II is where we build in the real redundancy and virtualize even more of our servers. Phase I just has us getting the low hanging fruit.
As for redundancy - we will only have one workhorse server running ESX. For Phase I though it will only run about 6 VMs or so. We will use a 3rd party backup product, probably esXpress, to hot backup the VMs to another storage location. In the event of a host failure one of the older boxes will be available to bring online and at least bring up some VMs to lessen the impact while the host server is repaired. While not the spiffy automatic roll over we could have had - it will allow fairly quick recovery by restoring those backups.
I am looking forward to the hardware getting there and getting some of this stuff setup! We've been using VMs in test for quite some time now. We have two VMs in production now, but the move to ESX Server will be the first major push for us. Should be fun!
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