Hello,
Im getting unclear answers to a specific question and hoping that this group can help clear things up. The question is this: will our primary server, upgraded to its maximum RAM and with the addition of an NAS, support modest virtualization in our environment?
The server is an HP ProLiant ML350 G4p (
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c00399201&lang=en&cc=us&taskId=101&prodSeriesId=459045&prodTypeId=15351) with a single 3.0GHz Intel Xeon CPU. Currently it has 3GB RAM, upgradeable to 12GB. It has 135GB of storage, configured with RAID 5 across 3 internal SCSI drives. Its running MS Small Business Server 2003 and serves as domain controller, mail server and file server. Its also the server for our mission-critical application, a clinical trial management package. Were a small shop, around 20 staff.
A second machine acts as an Oracle database server. That machine is an IBM xSeries 205 (
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/systems/support/system_x_pdf/x205spec.pdf), maxed out at 2GB RAM. It has two internal drives using Oracle mirroring for a total of about 200GB storage, most of which is unused.
We need more storage space for the primary server, and more RAM for Oracle. Drives for the ProLiant are hard to come by and expensive, and the hardware is aging. We dont want to spend a lot of money on that machine but we do need an inexpensive solution that will see us through the next 1-2 years.
My idea is to add storage via NAS (providing continuity of storage and installation environment when we do swap out the server), and upgrade the ProLiant to its max of 12GB RAM. Then add VMWare to create a virtual server and move Oracle to that environment. Having a second server for hardware redundancy and failover would be nice, but may not be in budget right now. At least having some of the services virtualized would speed recovery in the event of hardware failure. (Of course we have both onsite and offsite backup strategies already in place.)
Does this short-term solution represent creativity and frugality, or ignorance and short-sightedness? Will the current hardware support it and give us reasonable performance? Are our current (non-VM) backup solutions likely to support the new configuration? Any other issues or gotchas that I should be considering?
Thanks!
