[boondock]

My company is starting to look into doing some virtualization and starting to find a reputable vendor in our area to work with. However, I want to make sure that we are getting exactly what we need.

We have about 20-25 servers that could potentially be virtualized. We would mainly like to take some of our older Windows 200 Servers (around 7-8 years old) and put them in a virtual machine.

It's hard for us to do server migrations simply because we are a 24 hrs a day facility and it's hard to plan for downtime and make everyone happy.

We have decided that we do not want a full blown virtualization infrastructure to start with. We basically want the foundation to build towards a strong virtualization infrastructure. As servers need to be replaced or new applications come into the picture we purchase another blade or more disks for the SAN, etc.

Does this sound like a logical way to do a virtualization infrastructure this way?

If not, what approach should we take?

What are questions we should be asking to potential vendors?

What else should we know?


I didn't see a place to put this in the Virtualization forum, so I put it under Misc.

[DYasny]

get it all planned ahead - how many servers in VMs, what load they are under, how much storage needed.

the best possible way to work with ESX is to have it in a proper cluster with a fibre optic SAN attached
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GT4