Thank you all for your responses. This has been very helpful.

I'll get a little further around the bend of this learning curve and I may have more questions then.

Ken Dibble www.stic-cil.org

...

It's been suggested that I virtualize my network. To me the advantages are not clear but the risks are.

It really depends... We've been running a VMWare/ESXi host with up to 20 VMs using VMWare Essentials now for almost eight years now, but are slowly moving back to individual VMs.

Advantages of a virtual infrastructure are:

• fail over is easier (not cheaper!) done. All you need is a second server

and you can quickly move all machines to the new system. In an emergency, you can even get cheaper desktop grade hardware and things will continue to run albeit slowly, until the replacement hardware is available.

• Backup is a lot simpler and cheaper. You don't need one server license

per server. We use VM Explorer which is a heck lot cheaper than Veeam. Unlimited hosts, incremental backups... You can do hourly snapshots with little impact and go back to a previous state almost instantly.

• Combining hardware with low usage of resources.

• Servers that communicate over the network are faster since the integrated

software has almost now latency and no bandwidth constraints, if they are running on the same host.

Disadvantages are:

• You really need expensive storage. We are running a RAID array with six

disks near-line SAS disks, and that's really the minimum. A single disk has a limited number of write IOPS. If you do not increase that amount by adding either more spindles or using SSD drives, than you will see a significant performance decrease. Also, RAID controller become a lot more important, if you are not using a dedicated SAN. A SAN means 10Gb Ethernet or Fiber Channel, so a lot more expensive.

• More complex. That's the reason for us to move back to individual

machines. If something breaks you need someone who knows what they are doing. It'll work in a company that has multiple persons in IT. It doesn't work when the company owner happens to be the IT guy.

• More expensive. You really need server grade hardware. You need redundant

pieces of everything. You are limited in choices, because you suddenly have to pay attention to the VMWare or Microsoft compatibility list, otherwise you won't get support.

-- Christof

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