[Coco] For the love of an OS.

[Tony]

On Tue, 2011-05-03 at 02:25 -0400, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> >
> > As for consolidation, we've been able to trim down 12 datacenters of
> > about 60 servers, with 6 of those being paired windows clusters with HP
> > MSA500 clusters, down to (4) HP DL380 G7 hosts (2x 6-core Xeons, 72GB
> > RAM, 4x300GB SAS drives in RAID5), (2) HP/Lefthand P4500 7.2TB (12x600GB
> > SAS drives in RAID5) mirrored SANs , and (2) Cisco 3750 switches.
> >
> >From 3 full racks, down to half (or less) of a single rack.
> 
> we're well off topic here, but.. did you actually save any money once
> you paid licensing, support & maintenance for the virtualization
> software, trained/certified your staff, etc?  if you had an adequate
> san in place already, maybe.  if you have to replace or add a san,
> you're almost definitely spending more than if you'd have just stuck
> with classic servers, or used virtualization in a few "sweet spots"
> rather than site wide.   maybe your case is different than the norm,
> but I've had several clients regret the move to vmware... or more
> accurately the management regretted it.  The techs love it, makes life
> easy for them.
> 


For companies that don't need mission-critical max-uptime, no it's not a
good deal. For us, we need it. we had only 2-3 clustered systems before,
and they were the only ones guaranteed, to a point, to be up. If we lose
the PMS system, we lose money. We lose the POS system, we lose money. We
lose the food & beverage system, we lose money, and on and on...

Now, VMWare with HA, DRS, and vMotion, uptime is unbelievable.

I can put a VM host into maintenance mode, vSphere handles vMotioning
the VMs off, and I can patch, or work on the host. When done, I take it
out of maintenance mode, and vSphere handles rebooting it, and
re-populating it with VMs, and spreading the load with DRS.

vSphere is an absolute joy to deal with, and manage, as I can deploy a
new server, fully patched and ready to go, in 5 minutes using VMWare
templates and sysprep.

However, not every IT dept needs this. This is enterprise-class stuff,
for enterprise-class departments.

Our main datacenter is I think (10) quad 6-core servers (DL580's I
think? maybe DL585 quad 4-cores?), with 10 P4500 7.2TB SANs, hosting
over 280 VMs, everything from Windows to Linux servers.