Migrating servers to a virtual environment?

Question

VMware

Hello!

So, there are 7 servers: 2 AD (DNS + DHCP), 1 mail server (only the company's internal mail, 20 mailboxes) with a consultant base + , 1 1C server (NOT in terminal mode), 2 servers with MS SQL 2012 (the size of the databases on each is about 10 GB.), 1 file (the amount of data is about 300 GB.). Users working with 1C - 10 people, total users about 20.
OS on Windows 2003R2 or 2008R2 servers.

It is planned to migrate this small fleet to a virtual environment on VMware ESXi (with the purchase of an Esentials Kit license) with the further construction of an HA cluster.

Migration is planned to be carried out using Standalone Converter.

For hypervisors, we plan to purchase two servers: HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 (709942-421)
Hypervisors, as I read, usually recommend installing on a flash drive / memory card, and placing virtual machines on storage

. The question arose with storage: what level should it be? Or, so to speak, self-assembly or a ready-made solution? RAID level? SAS drives or SSDs? And if we want to provide HA, then there must be at least two storage systems?

Request to the guru: advise and suggest how true this solution is for servers (in terms of power) and what can be done better / easier? What about storage?

Thank you all in advance!

Answer 1

Comrade, for a budget of 400 thousand rubles. you will not build the virtualization you want. Unless you have a "sale of confiscated goods" there.
In order. HP Proliant DL380 Gen 8 without disks and with minimal memory costs more than 445 thousand, give or take, depending on the seller. For ONE server.
Further. What is called "SHD" will cost several million rubles (from one for some InforTrend to N for well-known brands).
Then, vSphere Essentials Kit does not know ANYTHING, except virtualization itself. Accordingly, you will not be able to assemble a failover cluster on it. To have HA, you need an Essential Plus Kit. The cost for two servers is 385 thousand rubles.
Therefore:
1) the budget will have to be expanded by 100 thousand.
2) your option is one-unit servers such as STSS, Aquarius, Kraftway. At STSS on the E3-1220 v5 4-cores processor, you can assemble a server with 64 gigs of RAM and no disks for 145 thousand rubles. For one. Accordingly, you need at least two - a total of 290 thousand rubles.
3) Hypervisor - any free one. As advised above - you can Hyper-V server, even in the free version it can do clustering.
4) instead of "storage" to build a common cluster storage, buy some server with 8 or more disk bays, stuff disks into it and build a shared storage. If you choose the Hyper-V hypervisor, then you can simply install Windows and make a shared folder via SMB3, Hyper-V can use this as a shared storage. If you do it on something else (KVM, VirtualBox, Proxmox) - you will have to configure access to the storage via NFS or iSCSI. We make such storages on FreeBSD + ZFS + multipath iSCSI, all on native FreeBSD features, without otherworldly components. It works fine, even automatic read cache can be written to SSD (ZFS L2ARC can be put on it).

Answer 2

There was a question with storage

You need to first monitor the load on the hard drives. At least how many bytes write, read. It would be better and the queue, at the same time. Then sum everything up, decide on the budget and take something worthwhile.

Answer 3

You know, this is actually a serious job - to determine which servers are needed for your requirements, which storage systems ... Again, it is not clear with the budget - there are restrictions, no, what it is. It would be really best for you to find an office that you can set a task for. Well, or study it all yourself. No one here can give such a detailed consultation - because even in order to give some practical advice, you need to sit and think ...