On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 12:18 PM, Hank . <hgedr...@gmail.com> wrote: > I deal mostly with SMB. Virtualization is a great fit if you have a number > of physical servers. But what about a single server situation?
That's pretty much the exact same scenario I was facing a year ago. You may find the thread I started about it useful: http://www.mail-archive.com/ntsysadmin@lyris.sunbelt-software.com/msg106517.html > have a couple replacements coming up where there is a single server > that is a DC, file and print, runs SQL or some other database for their > LOB and thats it. One of the motivations we had for virtualizing was to get away from the everything-on-one-OS-instance design. Microsoft *really* does *not* want to do this. They support it, but only grudgingly, and with a lot of caveats and gotchas. Updates to one thing means everything goes down when you reboot. Some stuff flat-out doesn't work together on the same instance. At the same time, we're a relatively small shop, and modern hardware is cheap. We could afford to buy a bigger box and then run a ton of VMs on it. That means we can now afford to dedicate an OS instance to each major service/function. We even went so far as to buy Data Center edition, solely to get the "unlimited VMs" license. It also makes disaster recovery a lot easier. Microsoft is *really* sensitive to the hardware you restore it to. Restoring a Windows server to significantly different hardware has always been an uncertain proposition. This eliminates that problem entirely: Every VM has identical virtual hardware. And even with a single physical server, no SAN, etc., migration and upgrades are easier. Moving to new hardware (without changing the software) is trivial. Just copy the VM files on the host. If we outgrow the single box, do the same thing, just for only some of the VMs. If we decide it's time to move to a SAN, we can add that and do the copy to that and we're off and running. So, lots of good reasons to do it. There is some added complexity. And it does enable a small biz to do a lot of things they couldn't do before, which can end up meaning more work for IT. :) -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
