I'm working in a new environment and before my time they under spec'd their vSphere ESXi host servers. Afterwards, they went and bought a few physical servers to handle heavy workloads. So they have a small virtualized environment for non-essential servers and a few mission critical physical servers. I've been running some resource monitoring tools the last few months and I've noticed those heavy spec'd individual servers are hardly using any resources. even during heavy workloads.
I'd like to slowly migrate the physical box OS's to virtual OS's and then slowly add the physical boxes to vSphere. The current ESXi hosts and the heavy spec'd individual servers are around the same age and specs i.e. similar core counts and CPU speeds (although some are intel and others are AMD). this would lead to a cluster with mixed physical ESXi hosts. I've seen this before in other environments but I've never actually questioned it... Is this common? uncommon? I'd need to upgrade the NICs in the physical boxes and get all the licensing sorted but I see this as a great way forward.
thoughts? considerations? comments?
I'd like to slowly migrate the physical box OS's to virtual OS's and then slowly add the physical boxes to vSphere. The current ESXi hosts and the heavy spec'd individual servers are around the same age and specs i.e. similar core counts and CPU speeds (although some are intel and others are AMD). this would lead to a cluster with mixed physical ESXi hosts. I've seen this before in other environments but I've never actually questioned it... Is this common? uncommon? I'd need to upgrade the NICs in the physical boxes and get all the licensing sorted but I see this as a great way forward.
thoughts? considerations? comments?