About a year ago I was faced with the reality that we’ll keep needing more servers, and that after 3 years we have to start paying to renew the warranties.  Combined with the fact that our resource utilization on most of our servers was lllllooooowwwww, it became pretty obvious that we needed to make a change (we can believe in! lol).  The answer to our problems: Virtualization.  Duh.

We already had two standalone VMWare ESX servers running production servers and I couldn’t be happier, so the decision to use VMWare as the platform for a large-scale (ok it’s just large-scale to us) virtualization initiative was a no-brainer.  We ordered 4 Dell rack servers with ESX 3 Enterprise, and a 7TB EqualLogic PS400E iSCSI SAN, to be connected using Procurve 2810-48 switches on both the network and iSCSI side  with separate switches for each.  I set it all up and started migrating physical servers into the virtual environment.  Abso-freaking-lutely awesome! » Read more: VMWare VI and iSCSI, a match made in…wait, what?