Hi.
I work at a medium-sized company which uses an ERP system utilizing MS SQL as it's database backend. The entire setup is (as of now) based around a single HP ProLiant ML350 G6 server running Windows 2008 R2, which has 2x Xeon E5504, 56GB of RAM and 8x600GB SAS 15k HDDs hooked up to a battery-backed HP 410i RAID controller.
The system's usual load is about 40 users (accessing the database) and from what we've gathered this seems to be well below the hardware's max capacity. We've recently came with an idea of upgrading to Windows 2012 R2 and changing the entire setup to make it a bit more "fault-tolerant", or "portable" - we do realize that having just one server with all of the company's data and bussiness-critical software is not good at all in the first place, but (unluckily) we are a bit both budget and staff limited in our department and because of that we're trying to improve the situation with what we have right now. Anyhow, like I said above, we'd like to move to Windows 2012 R2 and virtualize it using Proxmox on the same server that runs our current Windows 2008 setup - the idea is that if something goes terribly bad we'll be able to reinstall Proxmox, restore the Windows VM from a backup and get the entire setup up and running in much shorter time than it'd take to reinstall Windows + all the software and whole setup on bare hardware. Now, we *know* that this is *not the right way* of doing such things, we know that we should have some sort of backup hardware, with shared storage, and so on - we're hoping to get this right some time in the future but for now it's all we've got and we have to deal with it.
What I'd like to know is are there some known obstacles in creating such setup? Any culprits that we should test for beforehand, or things to be aware of before even starting? We want to keep the performance impact as low as we can, of course, so we've already made ouselves familiar with this: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Windows_2012_guest_best_practices and this: http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox_VE
We'd like to make this transition as simple and as effective as possible so we're planning to use XFS as our main filesystem combined with hardware RAID (according to these benchmarks http://jrs-s.net/2013/05/17/kvm-io-benchmarking/ we should do fine). We've been considering using ZFS which has some nice features that could become handy at some point, but decided to stick with good old, proven and supported setup to avoid any hassle in the middle of the whole thing. Besides we've never had any serious experience with ZFS and we don't feel like "exploring the uncharted waters" with a mission-critical setup
So any tips, warnings and suggestions, guys? I know that these questions may sound a bit noob-ish, and the idea may seem a little silly, but we think the idea is good (considering our situation) and it should make our lives a bit easier in the future and in case of any serious faliure.
Any constructive input appreciated!
I work at a medium-sized company which uses an ERP system utilizing MS SQL as it's database backend. The entire setup is (as of now) based around a single HP ProLiant ML350 G6 server running Windows 2008 R2, which has 2x Xeon E5504, 56GB of RAM and 8x600GB SAS 15k HDDs hooked up to a battery-backed HP 410i RAID controller.
The system's usual load is about 40 users (accessing the database) and from what we've gathered this seems to be well below the hardware's max capacity. We've recently came with an idea of upgrading to Windows 2012 R2 and changing the entire setup to make it a bit more "fault-tolerant", or "portable" - we do realize that having just one server with all of the company's data and bussiness-critical software is not good at all in the first place, but (unluckily) we are a bit both budget and staff limited in our department and because of that we're trying to improve the situation with what we have right now. Anyhow, like I said above, we'd like to move to Windows 2012 R2 and virtualize it using Proxmox on the same server that runs our current Windows 2008 setup - the idea is that if something goes terribly bad we'll be able to reinstall Proxmox, restore the Windows VM from a backup and get the entire setup up and running in much shorter time than it'd take to reinstall Windows + all the software and whole setup on bare hardware. Now, we *know* that this is *not the right way* of doing such things, we know that we should have some sort of backup hardware, with shared storage, and so on - we're hoping to get this right some time in the future but for now it's all we've got and we have to deal with it.
What I'd like to know is are there some known obstacles in creating such setup? Any culprits that we should test for beforehand, or things to be aware of before even starting? We want to keep the performance impact as low as we can, of course, so we've already made ouselves familiar with this: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Windows_2012_guest_best_practices and this: http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox_VE
We'd like to make this transition as simple and as effective as possible so we're planning to use XFS as our main filesystem combined with hardware RAID (according to these benchmarks http://jrs-s.net/2013/05/17/kvm-io-benchmarking/ we should do fine). We've been considering using ZFS which has some nice features that could become handy at some point, but decided to stick with good old, proven and supported setup to avoid any hassle in the middle of the whole thing. Besides we've never had any serious experience with ZFS and we don't feel like "exploring the uncharted waters" with a mission-critical setup
So any tips, warnings and suggestions, guys? I know that these questions may sound a bit noob-ish, and the idea may seem a little silly, but we think the idea is good (considering our situation) and it should make our lives a bit easier in the future and in case of any serious faliure.
Any constructive input appreciated!