Virtualise your servers

Posted on 19 Nov 2009 at 11:29

Jon Honeyball walks through the three steps to virtualising servers

Don’t muck around in between – you’ll end up doing the sums, the reality won’t match your guesstimate and you’ll need a lightly boiled Aspirin to get rid of the headache. And remember that the bottom line is that one well-specified, brand-new 1U rack server can easily replace four existing servers, maybe more depending on the loads.

For disk space, make sure you add up all the local storage needs for each existing server and then add some more on top for wiggle room. Remember that your new server will need to have properly resilient storage technology, such as a full mirror and so on – don’t skimp on this because you’re putting lots of eggs into one basket. Go for belt and braces, and remember that you’ll get many years of work out of this solution.

Finally, you need to choose your virtualisation tools. I think the choice boils down to either Microsoft’s Hyper-V or VMware’s ESX4

Finally, you need to choose your virtualisation tools. There are many contenders on the market, but I think the choice boils down to either Microsoft’s Hyper-V or VMware’s ESX4. There may be good reasons why you should use some other product, but be absolutely certain those reasons are good before you stray away from the two biggest players in the market.

You’ll need to cost up the necessary tools and services to move to the platform you need. Both vendors offer a free hypervisor, but that isn’t sufficient to create a working business solution.

Microsoft offers System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 Workgroup Edition for $505 (£307) as a package, which can manage five physical servers (Microsoft UK could only refer me to a US prices page).

VMware vSphere 4 Essentials costs $995 (£604) as a package and provides for three physical servers with up to two processors in each. Both vendors have more comprehensive and more powerful solutions, and none of them costs silly money if you consider the impact they’ll have on your business.

Choosing between the two firms has become almost a religious issue. Do you want your line-of-business servers to be managed by the same tool that manages your server infrastructure? If so, SCVMM is the way to go.

If you want to isolate hardware from OS and operations, then VMware is the way to go. At present, I favour the gospel according to VMware.
By this point you’ll have a shiny new server, hypervisor and management tools, and the next task is to shift your existing servers across onto the virtualised platform.

I’ll walk you through that in depth during my next column.

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