Transition Advice

Question

My organization (about 3-5 regular users and 10-15 rare-seldom other users) is looking at making a few transitions. We are retiring our internally developed data system hosted on a leased web server, and replacing it with a thrid-party web-hosted service. There are a few other items on this server that we would like to maintain (i.e. a few web-forms, very small databases, and related applications, as well as a copy of the legacy system). The up-time on these applications is not business essential. In house we have an old, second-hand server running Windows server 2003 (used for Active Directory, file storage, and print server).

My thought is to use one of our current, fairly new workstations with a lot more power and resources to replace both of the aforementioned servers. I am thinking of installing VMware vSphere Hypervisor on the machine and spinning up a server for a Windows server and another server for CentOS as a web server. The only thing we might have to purchase is a newer Windows Server (2008 or 2012).

Does this sound like a reasonable plan? Does anyone have any suggestions or considerations I may not have thought of?

Answer 1

There are a number of questions that arise from what you're describing.

First, if you're talking about vSphere, you should check that the hardware (which you don't describe) is on the VMware's Hardware Compatibility List (HCL). This will tell you if vSphere is going to be an option. If it's not on the list and you run into trouble, VMware will tell you it's unsupported, and you're out of luck.

You also need to reconsider your hardware. Fault-tolerance doesn't seem to be addressed if you're just using a workstation. You definitely need to have some sort of fault-tolerant RAID 1, 5, or 6 setup, so that one HD failure doesn't ruin your day. Hot-swap HDs will make your life simpler when one fails. Plus server hardware should have redundant NICs, redundant power supplies, error-correcting RAM...just buy a server. Server hardware is cheap compared to the value of your office being down while you figure out what's wrong and restore from backups.

Unless you have particular vSphere experience or needs (there's nothing in particular I see in your post), I don't understand why you wouldn't use Hyper-V virtualization that is built into Windows Server. For modest needs as you've described, VMware appears to be overkill. Since you already need to upgrade Windows (and you definitely do -- Windows 2003 end-of-life is July 2015), Hyper-V would offer less complexity in this scenario, and it comes as part of your license.