When I began my journey toward virtualization, it was early and there weren’t many good tools for planning performance capacity.  Step 1 started with a single host server with local storage, and after a year of running 14 low-resource servers on the one box, I had the leverage to take a big step up to Step 2.

Step 2 included an EqualLogic PS400E iSCSI SAN, and 4 Dell PowerEdge 1950III servers with VMWare ESX Enterprise, with a Virtual Center Server.  Our immediate needs/goals for virtualization were modest, with plans only to virtualize file, application, and mail servers and only 15 to 20 physical servers.  Our Oracle and SQL servers already had dedicated platforms and until we break into the realm of a ‘real’ SAN like EMC, I didn’t want to deal with the i/o headaches these systems would cause on our virtual platform. » Read more: Capacity Planning for Virtualization