18 posts and no mention of migration of ESX + VMware and VDI to Server 2012 Storage Server, Server 2012 Hyper-V and MS VDI?
Anyone who knows and can do that is literally worth millions /year to any large sized IT dept. in licensing costs alone.
Seriously, I haven’t seen such a MS-heavy incentive since the days of Groupwise and the advent of Server 2000 and DNS-based Active Directory. But this migration is much larger since it also includes SANs and cluster management as well as virtual desktops. That’s money. Big money.
Where I work, I built our VM Infrastructure literally from the ground up. As a part of another project, we had purchased an EMC SAN that had a ton of unused storage, even after factoring long term growth. I had been dabbling in VMware ‘on the side’ before then, and put all of that extra storage to good use. We had about 50 physical servers, in most cases each were existing just for handling a single application. I purchased 4 physical boxes, loaded to the max with processing power and RAM, building a ESX Cluster(three for production + one for fault tolerance).
Where I could, I ran a ‘P2V’ conversion on the existing servers, and was able to bring nearly all of them into the ESX Cluster. In nearly every case, the migrations went so well, there was NO downtime. We’re talking only a single dropped packet, while disabling the NIC on the physical server I was migrating from while connecting the NIC on the newly virtualized server. After I was done, my director walked into our datacenter, and it was nearly quiet. He saw all of the servers that had been shut down and panicked, thinking there was a power failure. I had to explain to him that our once sprawling datacenter was now contained in a single cabinet, only using 4Us. Not counting the SAN, which was in another cabinet.
The whole thing ran for about a year before he and my co-workers finally accepted and trusted it.