4 Servers into 1?

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Hi,
I plan to colocate 3 production servers to a data center Q1 2008 and wondered if using VMWARE would help me out. Our servers are Dell PowerEdge 2650/860 Xeon 2.4Ghz ranging from 1GB to 3GB RAM.

1 x IIS6 Webserver, 1 x SQL2000 server & 1 x MySQL/PHP/IIS6 server. The 2 IIS6 boxes currently do & will sit in a DMZ on the same subnet [10.10.10.0] while the SQL box will be on the LAN on a 192.168.60.0.

Could I potentially retire 2 of the less powerfull boxes, install VMWARE on the powerful one then run all 3 on one box with no problems? If so what minimum specs should I be aiming at for this and should the server fail how easy would it be to rebuild the VMWARE & corresponding servers config?

I have played with VMWARE briefly before, and seem to remember the "instances" create image files on the host server, if i back them up daily would that suffice in a Disaster recovery situation?

Sorry for the amount of questions...

G

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

The above would work very well if you implement this infrastructure using ESX Server via VMware. It is sort of like one server but on steroids. If you want more info on VMware's ESX server then check their web site as it has a plethora of information relating to ESX servers and how to's. Check www.vmware.com/esx servers.

 

Hi Onoski, thanx for looking.
I should have mentioned I have no budget to play with here, maybe I could push for a small one against long term hosting savings but nothing in the region of that.. My interest was spurred by the fact I could reduce my admin tasks and get spome sleep at night!

Cheers

 

you would be hard pushed to do it on a server with that little memory
its pushing your luck to say the least


memory is the key here, I have clients running 30+ production servers on single DL360 G5 servers with 24 - 32GB of memory, i'd sell the benefits and try and get some budget!
saving 2 or 4 u of rack space adds up pretty quickly in todays world

 

Thanx phoenix,
Hard to say I guess but have you any advice on what I should be looking at in terms of spec for the 3 server installs, the 2650can take 12GB but its running 2000 server so maximum is 4GB. The only option I have is to upgrade to 2003 datacenter edition which is gonna raise the price considerably.. Have you any thoughts on MS 2008 [http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/viridian_preview.asp]

One final question [I hope!], if I were to backup the images on the hour would that be backing up up the SQL data / IIS files too, or just the server mirror?

I may need to get an expert in to help on this one as my time is short

 

why would you need to upgrade to datacenter edition?
Enterprise supports more than 4GB
Standard supports 4GB too
and both can be had in x64 editions

Vi3 Starter edition has a list price (its called Foundation now) is 995 USD + u need some support (500 USD for gold)

That will support all 12GB if you put it in, but i'd advise not wasting money on 12GB of memory for an old server, bump it up to 8 or something and you will be fine

that will run all of those systems and then some, it loses a lot of the features of Vi3 Enterprise, but using Server or Virtual Server you wont get those anyway, so you have nothing to lose

 

With just one server where on earth are you gonna install those backups to when the PSU blows up or the motherboard melts ?

Just bear in mind that by putting 4 servers onto 1 you've just massively increased your risk and created a 4x bigger single point of failure, the new server better be 4x more reliable !

 

Good point, I had planned to use DoubleTake replication over WAN back to HQ, been using it for many years works a treat..

Cheers

 

Thanx Phoenix,
Am I right in thinking that Vi3 starter doesnt need the Windows OS, hence I can whack 8GB in? Does this install its own OS, if so I am wondering how I would configure RAID, Ive never needed to this outside of OpenManage GUI on Dell servers..

Cheers

 

you would configure the raid at the raid controller bios, before any boot up occurs
and thats right no windows required

 

Why spend all that money on Windows OS's?

You can put a 64 bit Linux OS as host that runs a kernel optimized for virtualization, for free, and then run all those individual Windows servers in Xen. It won't cost you a penny more for software, and my understanding of Xen is that it's actually faster than VMWare solutions.

 

This advertisement brought to you as a public service by Linux Advocates Against Microsoft's Evil (LAAME).

 

Oh brother. The man said he didn't have any budget to speak of. I put forth a solution that will cost him nothing but his time, allow him to use up to 64 GB's of ram in his host server, and this is somehow slamming MS?

 

No, you're not slamming MS at all in this post.

 

Then what was the point?

 

Humor.

 

Hmmmm.... My sense of humor must be failing me then, because I didn't see anything funny about it.

I just saw sarcastic needling when I tried to give someone some other options to use.

 

LOL. Those are about as bad as my bunny link this morning....