[cielo]

In this moment I'm trying to change the accounting application for my company. After a lot of researches we stopped at SAP. We've talked with one team to implement this software and they present us the hardware need for the servers : we need 2 dual xeon servers with 32GB of RAM etc(one server for SAP Services and the second for database; both will share the same NAS(through Fiber Channel or iSCSI) from the network and both will be able to take the other one jobs is something goes wrong with one of the servers ). After reading a lot about virtualization I saw some advantages(the same hardware platform - if one of the servers goes down I can put the virtual machine into another hardware in a few minutes and the down time will be reduce from a few days or maybe weeks needed to buy a new machine to few minutes; the backup of VM is few clicks away : if I need to make some changes that I'm not so sure about them I can take a snapshot before make any changes etc ) that make me think to implement it.
From your experience the advantages offered by virtualization can be used in my case?
PS : excuse my bad English.

[Maish]

Yes of course, but you would have to make the calculations of if the software will bring the price of your solution down or up.

Not all of the features you have listed below are available for free. Snapshots, backup etc.. Doing this properly will cost you money.

It will most probably not save you on hardware costs either because you will still need both physical servers in case of one of them failing.

provide more detail as to what you would like to achieve - so that the forum can provide you with a suggestion for a solution.

[jasonboche]

The amount of RAM required concerns me a bit. Keep in mind that many vendors are not yet proficient with determining the resource needs for a virtual server. Vendors will still ask you to throw a lot of hardware (RAM and CPU, etc.) at the solution and that's not the way it works in the virtual world. We don't like to waste precious shared resources. You will need to test the running of this application in a lab, dev, or pilot environment to see if it performs adequately on a virtual platform. This process is often called "determining if a server is a VM candidate".

[cielo]

I'm sure that the price will not go down, at least in the first phase. As I described in an earlier post, I need 2 machines for the new ERP solution. In the first step I want to install on both machines Vmware ESX or ESXi and on each of them I will install an Win2k3 Ent. After this first step, I will monitor the resources consumption in production and maybe I will be able to put another VM for a business intelligence, a citrix server, an warehouse management system etc. If I will be able to complete the second step the cost will be reduced considering the fact that I can install a maximum 4 VM for Windows Enterprise for one bought license (from my known).