[ngw] GroupWise, VMWare ESXi, ZCM, etc...

[Joshua Pitlick]

That sounds like a good plan.  We have three DL380 G5s with dual quad core Xeons and 16 GB RAM each and an MSA2312i SAN.  The reason for three servers as opposed to two is for VMware's DRS technology.  That's basically adaptive load balancing.  If you only have two servers, one server would have to be capable of running all the VMs.  If you aren't concerned about that, two servers should server your purposes.
 
I'm not sure if the logic has changed, but it used to be that you should plan for 3-5 VMs per server core.  Really the biggest bottleneck is disk and network I/O.  Spec your servers with SAS drives and extra NICs.
 
Josh

>>> "Kenneth Etter" <kle at msktd.com> 4/16/2010 3:39 PM >>>
Joshua,

The stuff I was planning to put on the third server all have fairly low hardware requirements...so maybe I'll just combine those with ZCM on ESXi.  Thanks for the reply!
 
Regards,
Ken


>>> "Joshua Pitlick" <JPitlick at acog.org> 4/16/2010 3:26 PM >>>
Ken,
 
That sounds reasonable.  We ran VMware Server for over a year with a bunch of VMs including GMS.  You don't really need a whole server for ZCM.  We virtualized ours on ESXi and it works perfectly well.  You might also consider virtualizing GroupWise and just running ESXi on all three new servers.  That way if the need ever arises for a more robust virtualization environment, you could just get an iSCSI SAN and vSphere and migrate your existing VMs to the SAN.  That's what we are in the process of doing.  We haven't fully virtualized GW yet, just the secondary domain, GWIA, and WebAccess.  We have a slightly bigger PO than you do.
 
Joshua Pitlick
Lead Systems Engineer
American College of Ob-Gyn
409 12th Street, SW
Washington, DC 20024

>>> "Kenneth Etter" <kle at msktd.com> 4/16/2010 3:11 PM >>>
We are a small business - 65 employees.  I currently have one NetWare 6.5 server running GW8(MTA, POA, and GWIA) and ZfD 7.  I'm getting ready to purchase some new server hardware.  My original thought was to get three new servers.  Move the GW8 stuff onto the first running SLES or OES.  Setup ZCM 10 on the second (I assume SLES).  And setup ESXi on a third to host some VMs so I could replace a few auxilliary PCs doing individual tasks in my server room.  Due to lack of hardware, I haven't had a chance to play with ESXi yet.  I'm also fairly new to Linux, although I do have GMS and Reload running on SLES.  Does this sound reasonable?  Or does anyone have a better suggestion?  Thanks!
 
Regards,
Ken Etter



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