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Best Practices For Infrastructure Upgrade?
An anonymous reader writes "I was put in charge of an aging IT infrastructure that needs a serious overhaul. Current services include the usual suspects, i.e. www, ftp, email, dns, firewall, DHCP — and some more. In most cases, each service runs on its own hardware, some of them for the last seven years straight. The machines still can (mostly) handle the load that ~150 people in multiple offices put on them, but there's hardly any fallback if any of the services die or an office is disconnected. Now, as the hardware must be replaced, I'd like to buff things up a bit: distributed instances of services (at least one instance per office) and a fallback/load-balancing scheme (either to an instance in another office or a duplicated one within the same). Services running on virtualized servers hosted by a single reasonably-sized machine per office (plus one for testing and a spare) seem to recommend themselves. What's you experience with virtualization of services and implementing fallback/load-balancing schemes? What's Best Practice for an update like this? I'm interested in your success stories and anecdotes, but also pointers and (book) references. Thanks!"
The low-budget solution: buy one server (like a Poweredge 2970) with like 16GB RAM, a combination of 15k and 7.2k RAID1 arrays, and 4hr support. Install a free hypervisor like Vmware Server or Xen, and P2V your oldest hardware onto it. Later on you can spend $$$$$ on clustering, HA, SANs, and clouds. But P2V of your old hardware onto new hardware is a cost-effective way to start.
I, personally, am TOTALLY in agreement with the ethos of whoever designed it, a single box for each service.
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Virtualisation is, IMHO, *totally* inappropriate for 99% of cases where it is used, ditto *cloud* computing.
I totally disagree.
Look at some of the services he listed: DNS and DHCP.
You literally can't buy a server these days with less than 2 cores, and getting less than 4 is a challenge. That kind of computing power is overkill for such basic services, so it makes perfect sense to partition a single high-powered box to better utilize it. There is no need to give up redundancy either, you can buy two boxes, and have every key services duplicated between them. Buying two boxes per service on the other hand is insane, especially services like DHCP, which in an environment like that might have to respond to a packet once an hour.
Even the other listed services probably cause negligible load. Most web servers sit there at 0.1% load most of the time, ditto with ftp, which tends to see only sporadic use.
I think you'll find that the exact opposite of your quote is true: for 99% of corporate environments where virtualization is used, it is appropriate. In fact, it's under-used. Most places could save a lot of money by virtualizing more.
I'm guessing you work for an organization where money grows on trees, and you can 'design' whatever the hell you want, and you get the budget for it, no matter how wasteful, right?