daxtrajero wrote:
Perfect thanks.
Last question(s) I promise!
1) Each physical workstation currently runs MS Office, Sage Accounts and Outlook for email. Does it make sense to run all of these from the virtualPC?
2) The hardware I intend to run ESXi on is Intel Dual Core, 2 LAN cards, 4GB RAM, 2x500GB SATA II drives
Is this spec OK to handle the virtual 2k3 server and 10 XP workstations ? I've looked at the minimum requirements and it meets those, but not sure how mucb further to go to handle my 10 workstations & server?
1) yes, that would be fine
2)kind of short on the memory - you need enough ram for each of the servers/workloads that will be running on it. You can "get away" with assigning less memory to virtual machines than for actual physical boxes, but I would want the esxi host to have at least 8GB of ram - 12GB would be great. For disk - you want as many spindles as possible - and for the spindles to be as fast as possible. If I were designing it, and recognizing budgets, I would get a pair of cheap small disks to mirror (to be used as OS - really small is fine. Then I would have 4 or 5 SAS disks in a raid 5
Will what you have specified work? ermmmm ... maybe, kinda - it depends entirely on the amount of useage and load. If you have issues then it would make sense to run all applications except perhaps for the sage accounts app on the physical desktops, and only use the virtual machine workstations for the sage stuff.