Fourteen Physical Servers for an SMB
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@Mfd201 said:
I take care of 14 physical servers, many of which are Hyper-V hosts running our business VMs (file server, domain controllers, a couple web servers, remote desktop servers, etc).
You say that you are at a small company, but fourteen physical servers is huge. A company of even three or four hundred can generally run from a single physical server for load and then generally would have a second for failover as that is a lot of people to have not working should a single server fail. It's completely conceivable that a single physical server would push closer to a thousand users today with the latest models if you can squeeze enough storage capacity and IOPS into it.
How big is this environment and what is pushing you to so many servers?
I am starting this from one thread but doing the quote so as to fork it into another thread. Don't want to discuss the IT environment in the career thread.
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This is a really good question because I handle many small businesses and none of them have ever approached more than 4 servers prior to virtualiztion giving us the ability to make a separate instance for a specific task.
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I noticed that too, we only have 5 servers, and 2 of those are hypervisors. We're consolidating even more so in the coming months.
Small fleet, more power, less to maintain.
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I did a double take when I originally read that but I assumed he actually meant 14 virtual servers.
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@JaredBusch said:
This is a really good question because I handle many small businesses and none of them have ever approached more than 4 servers prior to virtualiztion giving us the ability to make a separate instance for a specific task.
We were three prior to virtualization at NTG (supporting ~100 users.) That was back on Pentium III hardware (real PIII, not higher end PIIIs, I am sad to say.) We had one dedicated to the enterprise database. One for the enterprise application platform. And one "catch all" that was more powerful than the other two combined that ran everything else like email, intranet and whatever.
After virtualization we went to one. The amount of compute capacity (and now storage capacity) that you can get from a single host today means that outside of needing the ability to have a redundant platform to go to in case of failures almost no SMB actually needs a second server. Exceptions exist, of course, but the average company with workloads common for manufacturing, office workers, etc. can do so much with so little.
Fewer machines doesn't just mean fewer parts to fail, it also means less administration effort around maintenance. You can focus on the machine that matters rather than being spread thin between many devices. And it means less rack space, less noise, less heat generated, less power being pulled from the wall, easier to deal with UPS resources, etc. It all "adds up" to a lot of potential cost savings.
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The OP clearly stated 14 physical services, several of which were Hyper-V hosts
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I did a double take when I originally read that but I assumed he actually meant 14 virtual servers.
He mentioned physical and that they were running a mix of Hyper-V and VMware ESXi. So I am relatively confident that he did not mean VMs.
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A lot of these problems would be solved if only the world started excepting "IT Generalist" as a valid job title.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Easy test: have you ever seen one of your servers in person? Good chance you aren't a full time SA
True we have people for that they rack them and replace HW. I have seen mine but it's rare. Same thing for the Datacenter UPS and HVAC we have people for that.
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I forked the career and title discussion into its own thread.
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In the SMB environment most hiring managers don't know the difference between IT Generalist and IT Admin. I'd be willing to bet the assumption would be
IT Generalist = someone who can support desktops
IT Admin = someone who can support serversIn the enterprise, sure they might, would probably know the difference, but SMB? you really think they do?
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Two posts while I was forking. Sadly it doesn't let me port those over after the fork is made.
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A big part of why there are 14 servers is due in part to mindset. Before I came on board, the person running this coach was a big physical server advocate. Virtualization was inferior to dedicated hardware, especially for SQL. When the need for a new process came up, a box was procured and racked up. Some of these were 16gb ram 1TB array setups. (This was not my thinking)
It has taken me a little while to prove the benefits of virtualization.
After moving some of the server roles from p2v and getting them on a bigger host, it was decided that maybe we should have some sort of redundancy, so a replica server seemed the easiest way to go.
A big problem now is sprawl and how a couple of these boxes are running independent domains for different applications. My initial goal was to consolidate the in house vms and use remaining hardware for a possible SOFS storage build. Part of what keeps me from digging in is having to put out fires with clients or other areas.
Also, 2 of these hosts are mostly dedicated to virtual desktops for a client, which is why the total number of guests is at 84.
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What kind of company are you, if you don't mind me asking?
MSP? Consultant? Service provider, etc?
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So you have no budget to make changes, What's the goal here?
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@Dashrender said:
So you have no budget to make changes, What's the goal here?
His goal was career growth and experience. I brought the SAN or storage consolidation up as a means to improve the environment, shake up the status quo and get experience in a totally new area through potentially improving the environment.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
So you have no budget to make changes, What's the goal here?
His goal was career growth and experience. I brought the SAN or storage consolidation up as a means to improve the environment, shake up the status quo and get experience in a totally new area through potentially improving the environment.
Awww yes, that's right. Considering there is no budget according to Mfd, I'm not really sure what can be done.
Mfd - Perhaps you can have @NTG or Dell run a DPack for you so you can get a good idea of where you stand today. Perhaps you can do some consolidation now within your current confines.
