Trying to plan out a corporate VMware build - Discuss

[Sasiki]

I'll try to describe my situation as best as possible. Also note that there is a shop around here that has experience with VMware. If I need to, I'll contact them.

We have 8 offices total. 35 pc's in the main office, 18 pc's in 1 branch office, 8 in another. The other 5 have between 4 and 6 each. Our main application server is a SCO Unix server that is backed up to a tape each night. The desktops are ALL on a workgroup environment with files stored locally. There are 2 other business critical applications that are used. One is a broadcast fax server and the other application is for EDI (electronic data interchange). The fax server is used Friday through Sunday to fax out our weekly availability. The EDI software is used on Mondays and Thursdays. Right now, both of these are on a standard desktop PC that runs 24/7. It is not being backed up, but remember, is critical to the company.

My goal is to create an infrastructure to address my main issues now, but be able to expand upon it when we go Exchange and Domain environment.

Main concerns:
Availability of faxserver and EDI software
Data on desktops

I feel that I can solve this with a VMware install. For the file server portion, I will likely use Ubuntu and Ebox. I have tested it out on a crappy old server and it will do exactly what I want. I can map the users My Documents folder to their secure directory on the file server. This will enable me to just worry about backing up the file server. The Faxserver and EDI software are Windows based. Instead of doing 2 individual servers, I can do a flavor of VMware onto one server and virtualize both Ubuntu and Windows Server, or even XP Pro to accomplish what I want for the faxserver and EDI.

With all files being stored on a central server, high uptime is a must. With 2 business critical applications on the server, again, high uptime is a must.

To address the uptime, I can do 1 of 2 things. I can install VMware on 1 machine and install the 2 hosts locally and have cold spare server hardware if necessary. If one server goes down, I can pull the drives out of it and put in the cold spare hardware. With 4 hour onsite warranties though, having a cold spare server may not be necessary. Or I can do 2 servers and a SAN. With 2 servers and a SAN, the migration would be seamless if one server were to fail.

If doing the 1 server deal, I would have that server make a snapshot of itself to an external hard drive. This way, it could [seemingly] easily be restored should a total hardware failure occur.

In my offices with 18 pc's and 8 pc's, I'd like to do a simple tower server with Ubuntu and Ebox. Have it back up nightly to an external hard drive and on weekends to the File server in my main office. In the other 5 offices, maybe just assign 1 computer per night to stay on and have them backup through FTP to the file server.

Whatever I do, I need to be able to expand upon it in the future. Right now, I am thinking I need to do maybe a Dell 2950 2U rack server and an external hard drive and tape drive for backups. The external drive for incremental realtime backups and tape drive for nightly archival. With the 2950, I would be able to use it when I expand on this project, implementing an Exchange server and Active Directory.

Let's begin the discussion there. I would like to have a solution figured out by the end of the week if at all possible.

 

[Sasiki]

After reading a bit more, I think I can accomplish what I want to do by using an ESXi server and licensing VCB (consolidated backup). I can do incremental backups throughout the day to an external hard drive and then tape backup at night. I will have 2 VM's, a Windows host for the couple critical windows apps I have and a Linux host for the Ubuntu / Ebox file server.

This is barebones, but allows me to expand on it in the future when if we implement Exchange and active directory.

Any comments?

 

[jpochedl]

What are you usng as a fax server? If your fax server requires direct access to a fax board, you may not be able to virtualize it.. If the fax server just passes the faxes out to an external IP fax service, then you should be OK.

Otherwise, it sounds like you've got a reasonable start on the plan.

 

[Thuleman]

We have 8 offices total. [...] I would like to have a solution figured out by the end of the week if at all possible.

I will go a little off topic here, but I think that posting to an Internet message board on a Tuesday, and looking for a workable and stable solution for an 8 office job by the weekend of the same week, is ... imho misguided.

Sure, there's no sense to over-plan things, but with that many people depending on the setup, and with business critical operations on the line, serious planning is paramount.

The main question really is: What's your budget?
Do you work for that shop, or are you an outside consultant? I know you wrote "we", implying that you work there, but it's the Internet, everyone lies, and it's important because it you don't work there you may not have all the details on how the folks in the trenches use and rely on IT.

If the end-user isn't happy with your solution then it will create considerable problems, regardless of whether you work there or not, but it will of course be worse for you if you are actually employed there.

I can map the users My Documents folder to their secure directory on the file server. This will enable me to just worry about backing up the file server.

Map how?
Remote file systems are handy, but not without pitfalls. Since it seems that you are not running AD, you have considerably less control over where users save their files. I have personally seen many cases where users create their own directory structure under the root directory, thus completely bypassing My Documents.

What's the plan when the network to the branch offices is down?
How about mobile computing? What if someone buys a Mac (hopefully not, but still).

Switching from local to remote networked storage is a big step and will not work without end-user buy-in. Yes, if something goes wrong you can say "They should have saved it to My Documents", but in the end the biggest question will be "Why didn't IT back this up?". No matter what the user is supposed to do, the blame if stuff goes wrong often falls to IT rather than the inept end-user.

To me, "business critical" and 4-hour on-site hardware replacement are worlds apart. If something is business critical then downtime is unacceptable. A 2-node VMware HA cluster can take care of that (at considerable expense for the software licenses alone, not even talking hardware).

There are any number of things that can be done, but there's really no point to spend the time to suggest anything unless it's known what the budget is.

 

[Sasiki]

Good reply Thuleman. First off, I am employed by the company. I feel that I have a good solution pieced together. I am currently managing a workgroup environment with a few servers and 105 users, 10 of which are full time mobile, another 10 that have a laptop within the office, but take it home every day. The 4 servers I have is a production server with POP e-mail, payroll server, EDI / Faxserver (on the same computer), and terminal server for a daughter company.

I met with a local PC shop today to ensure that I had all of my bases covered. My solution is as follows:
2 Dell 2970's with 73gb sas drives, mirrored - for main facility
Dell MD3000 DAS - 5 x 300gb 15k RPM SAS - main facility
Inexpensive server with 3 x 500gb raid 5 sata for local snapshop backup
Dell 2970 at an offsite location for total loss of main facility - cold server that I can upload images to from an external hard drive
VMware Standard acceleration kit - 4 CPU license
Backup Exec 12.5 (which Dell says will do my server snapshots to the backup server in my facility with VMware and local storage for images.. and also backup the images to an external hard drive)

In the event of local 2970 failing, the other detects lost heartbeat and pulls the VM's off of the MD3000. In the event of the DAS failing, I have 15 minute incremental images on the backup server within my facility, but in separate building. Lastly, in the event of a TOTAL loss of my facility, I have the 3rd 2970 at one of our branch locations and the MD3000 snapshop on some sort of external media, likely a hard drive.

In doing this solution, I will be moving to AD and Exchange with folder redirection for My Documents. A lot of my desktop PC's are in branch offices, but they do not use a lot of files. Most of the Excel / Word stuff is done out of our corporate office. Having their files in our corporate office on the server should suffice.

The cost for the 3 2970's, Server 2008 Enterprise, Exchange server, 110 Exchange CAL's, 110 Server 2008 CAL's, VMware license, and Backup Exec is right around $37,000. Labor cost from local IT shop is estimated between 60 and 80 hours, but should be considerably less as I will just have them work with me initially and then me add the PC's to the domain, set up exchange boxes, etc. This $37,000 does not include our production server. This solution does no good if that server is not included within the project. I will be working tomorrow to get pricing on updated the licensing for it and migrating from SCO Unix to Windows. The software company does not support the application on Unix any longer. I would anticipate that price to be between $20,000 and $30,000.

I proposed the solution to the CEO today and gave him a figure of $65,000. When I gave him this number, I was pegging the cost of the production server migration at $20,000. After work today, I learned that we will need additional upgrades to make the software compatibility with Windows Server. I should have exact pricing on this tomorrow or Thursday.

Anything you'd like to add? I have made no commitments to buy anything, so I can scrap the whole project and start over if I need to.

Cliff Notes:
Proposed project of $65,000.
While money is not in the bank to do the project, the risk of not doing the project far outweighs the cost of doing it.