Today we look at the hardware that we will need for the new infrastructure. Let us look at the requirements:
- Mail communication with Web-Access
- Collaboration through Share Point
- Expandability for future Applications (Time-Reporting is a hot topic)
- SQL-Server supporting both Share Point and other web-applications
- High availability
Considering the Software requirements and our knowledge, we will go for a complete Microsoft environment consisting of the following Products:
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Enterprise
- Microsoft Office Share Point Server 2007
- Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition
As high availability is also a requirement, we will virtualize the servers using an ESX 3.0 Cluster. To accommodate this need we will use the following Hardware
- 2x HP DL370 G5 with 2 Quad-Core XEONs at 2.33Ghz and 8GB RAM
- 1x HP MSA 1000 with 500GB Disk-Space
The ESX-Cluster is controlled through a shared Virtual-Center to enable Vmotion, high availability (HA) and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) functionality.
As we are on a VERY short timescale, the whole project should fall flat following the standard rules of business. Fortunately, there is such a system already at the datacenter which was planned to become a test-system for our server-guys. Well, now it is ours.
After a while the ESX-Cluster is ready to be filled with virtual machines.
3 Weeks to Deadline….