Too much info, where do I begin to virtualise a few servers

[Chriss217]

Hi everyone,

My first post here (pls be gentle). I have a little VM knowledge from one company, but now I want to encourage and convince my other workplace (a charity / medical education center for kids) to virtualise some servers during the next upgrade planned for this year. Naturally costs are an issue.

Some early questions I have are:

Hardware: Is a HP DL380 2CPU Quad Core Xeon, 8GB ram, SATA drives: suitable for running several (4) Windows-2008 servers as VM's plus 6 Linux VM's.

Someone suggested "ESX 3.5.0 Server Foundation". I believe this costs around 800 GBP. Should I plan on using ESX 4.0?

Is ESX 3.5 or 4.0 64 Bit. Can I run both 32 Bit and 64 Bit VM's.

It is unlikely we will need to move running servers, so there's no need for vMotion, but I assume all ESX versions will allow me to take a snapshot of a VM and duplicate it as another VM.

Is it possible to add drives at a later date and allocate more disk resources.

Sorry about asking some dumb questions here, can anyone point me to a suitable newbie resource? Thanks muchly.

[DSTAVERT]

8GB RAM will be a little light for the VM's you have planned. I would use ESXi4 since you have the hardware for it. If the server has hardware virtualization then you could run 32 bit and 64 bit. Without the hardware virtualization you would be limited to 32bit. The Essentials or Essentials Plus package would do fine. Make sure the controller has the BBWC module and that write caching is enabled.

Webcast QuickStart

Webcast ESXi Webstart

[DSTAVERT]

Adding drives is certainly possible. They can become additional datastores.