Im in the throws of trying to develop a virtulisation solution for my company. The solution includes typical servers such as domain controllers , Microsoft Exchange , Microsoft SQL server , A mail archiver, a WSUS server , An antivirus server and a document archive, TS servers,print server and a document processing workflow server.
Its a little busy!
Theres nothing speacial about the network our apps or useage what is quite unique is the complexity of the systems for such a small company driven by a diverse customer base with very different requirements.
So the solution has to be reliable but flexible, robust but adapable and have the ability to grow with the company as we move into an ever changing future. Currently just over 100 users across six sites.
We believe the infastructure should be built around VMware Vsphere 5, with all the VM’s currently likely to be Windows 2008 R2 64 bit , exchange to move to 2012 and SQL to 2008. We want as few as possible points of failure and reasonable availability and as little data loss as can be expected with a limited budget.
The most critical item is the SAN. and this is where I am struggling.Three soluton providers have three suggestions ; VNXe series ;DELL MD3600 Series; HP Left Hand P4500 series .
I wonder if anyone has some helpful guidance or just some useful suggestions about what the core technologies for these different SANs are and the pros and cons for each. It is important to us that the management and operation of the SAN is as simple as possible in terms of the management interface and seemless operation.
At the moment we have little SAN experience in house so we need some guidance on the SAN’s above any appropriate backup suites for the solution and although at the moment we we don’t have a seperate DR site is there anything to consider now for this possibility in the future and or a more distributed server architecture.
Many thanks in advance to those who respond.
