VM or Physical?

[Leisher]

Looking for some advice...

So my company is building a new plant in SC. I am building the IT component of the plant/offices, but this also provides me the opportunity to make that site my DR site.

So my plan is to make the server there a "mirror" of the server room here with minimal delay between data. So if this place were wiped out by a tornado or something, we could fly down there and begin work again with only a few minutes of lost work.

In reality, my company is ok with 1 day of lost work. Anything less would be great, but we'd accept a day. On top of that, We've had entire network outages that have lasted 4 hours, and nobody has batted an eye. (This was way back when I started, the previous IT folks fucked up the server room badly, and we had to shut down the network while we aired out the 114 degree room...)

We're a small company with only 80 employees (not counting SC folks we're hiring), a dozen servers (that I'm going to shrink down to 10ish), one iSeries server, a VoIP, and really not much else. We do not currently do any virtualization because we honestly don't need it. Also I should note that we're about support and service over price. I've yet to hear the word "No" when it comes to my budget or even things out of budget (This is Xanadu for IT guys).

My dilemma is do I want to completely change my culture here in IT and go with virtualization (VMware) or just use physical servers down there in SC? I've now gone through a week of training on VMware, and I know its strengths and its weaknesses (I've been right for years about it...). For a company our size, we can do it, but we don't need to.

AppAssure is the product we're going to be using to help mirror the sites, and do the DR stuff. It works with physical servers as well as virtual ones. We found it to be just as good as VEAM, if not better because of it's ability to do physical servers and it maintains our "one vendor" environment. So that side of things is set.

I just don't know what to do about the servers.

Do I get three "big" servers at each site and virtualize my whole environment? This comes with many perks like lower equipment costs (although not really), less equipment to manage, eliminates single points of failure, makes recovery from failure a quick process, etc.

However, it also comes with negative like we don't know it and could be more dependent on vendor support, the licensing for VMware adds more cost, adds another vendor to the environment, adds another layer of management, constant adjusting of resources to ensure no server is hogging them, etc.

Or do I stick with physical servers?

Pros -
-Technology we know.
-No constantly "squeezing the lemon"
-One vendor
-Actually cheaper

Cons -
-More machines to maintain (again, less than a dozen)
-Slower recovery time (although Dell AppAssure disputes this...)
-Not as "green"

I honestly don't know what to do. We are NOT a rapidly expanding company in terms of technology.I'm not going to be adding a dozen servers over the next year.

I want to lean away from VM because I've always maintain that it's more gimmick than substance, particularly for smaller companies like this one. The VM experts I've been dealing without throughout this process and my training do not dispute this, and even agree.

However, shrinking down my server room's equipment demand is a good thing...right? Why?

100 servers into 20 = good
10 servers into 3 = ?

I mean, is VMware going to make my environment more complicated for no real benefit?

Any thoughts?

[Malcolm]

Virtualization kicks ass if I have fluctuating scale to worry about, I'm in an environment where people dynamically need a lot of sandboxes, or I'm insane enough to keep around code that has to run on multiple platforms and I need to cut hardware costs.

We are NOT a rapidly expanding company in terms of technology.I'm not going to be adding a dozen servers over the next year.

Kind of makes sense to use physical servers from what you're saying. The question is how much from the "con" category are you willing to put up with for the cheaper cost?

[TheCatt]

VMware will make things more complicated and expensive. Especially expensive. The upside is fewer servers to manage, although you're still managing the virtual servers. The HA stuff built in to VMWare is nice, but sounds like you have an acceptable/better alternative.

Like Malcolm says: The best benefits I've seen from virtualization are for dev/test (redeploying images quickly, scaling out images, sandboxes, etc). Doesn't sound like you need that at all.

I'd stick with physical if I were you. Unless you had some particular servers that would make the bang for the $ in terms of consolidation (several lightly used servers that cannot be installed together for whatever reason-Different OS/conflicting configurations).

[thibodeaux]

Cloud!

[TheCatt]

Oh, and uh, do you need a part-time DB guy?

[GORDON]

I know a drugstore chain that needs one.

[TheCatt]

I get the sense you mean "Drugstore chain that sucks nuts," as opposed to "drugstore chain that actually wants to hire someone"

[GORDON]

Hard to say. I am in a field tech role in this instance and far removed from corporate, I just know that from what I can sense of their field tech support structure, IT peeps would be getting fired in any of the past companies for which I have worked.

[Leisher]

So far the best reasons I've been given to go to VMware are:
-It's really easy to clone a machine for testing or sandbox (something we've never done or needed in 9 years here)
-You save $20 per year in electricity per server you get rid of.
-It looks good on your resume.

[Leisher]

I'm leaving things "as is" here, and virtualizing my new server room down there.

Best of both worlds.