As i said in a previous post in our preparation for SharePoint 2010 we have started to invest in virtualisation technology using Microsoft HyperV R2 based on Server 2008 R2. This for me has been a big shift in thinking in taking this technology on and trusting it to run our servers but thanks to some of the tools available this has been made a lot easier for me, and with the release of HyperV R2 even easier with some of the benefits being live migration, Processor compatibility mode and dynamic storage being just some of the reasons. Over the next few posts i would like to take you through some of the features that made this decision a no brainer for us and hopefully explain some of the benefits for others.
Through these posts i will talk to you about HyperV R2 on Server 2008 R2 the hardware that we have purchased to enable us to use this. HyperV manager, System centre virtual machine manager including the live migration feature and also the physical to virtual conversion which i hope to show you in a video.
First of all the hardware to achieve the fault tolerance that i require for Twynham School we purchased 3 x Dell PowerEdge servers with:-
2x Intel Xeon X5570 Processor (2.93GHz, 8M Cache, 6.40 GT/s QPI, Turbo, HT)
To include RAM: 72GB Memory for 2CPU (18x4GB Dual Rank RDIMMs) 1066MHz
Hard Drives: 2 x 300GB SAS 15k 3.5″ HD Hot Plug
Also to allow us to setup the shared clustered volume we purchased a Dell MD3000i http://www.dell.com/content/topics/topic.aspx/global/products/pvaul/topics/en/us/pvaul_md3000i_landing?c=us&l=en
Now this was not a cheap exercise with the servers coming in at £5000 each and the MD3000i box at around £6000 but now we run 19 virtual servers on these 3 boxes and bearing in mind that i used to pay anywhere between £2000 and £3500 for each server i think you will see that it makes sense long term financially. Also please bear in mind the power savings, we do have a range of server with differing specs and age but now we are running 3 servers compared to 19 previously that must equate to quite a saving on our power bill and not forgetting our air conditioners as we can go from 2 to 1 unit.
These virtual servers also enabled us to set up Office Communication Server 2007 R2 during the summer this software required us to have 1 OCS front end server and also an OCS edge server previously we would have had to go out and buy 2 physical servers but with HyperV we just created 2 virtual OCS servers.
Related posts:
- Preparing for SharePoint 2010 Back in June I and Mike Herrity visited Seattle where...
