Essential Technology: A GCS Blog

We're finally seeing the ProLiant G5s and virtualization-enabled PowerEdges become widely available in the used server market. Many clients are asking for our recommendations. In a virtualized environment with VMware's High Availability or Microsoft's Failover Clustering, is used hardware an acceptable option?

First let me say that I've long been opposed to used hardware in traditional environments. The hardware represents a small portion of the overall cost of the implementation. The installation and configuration, whether performed in-house or by a consultant, is wasted when the hardware has to replaced. I would rather see that service cost spread across four of five years of use. Why save a few thousand dollars to sacrifice a lot of ROI? Cash is the only valid reason. The difference between new and used gear is rarely enough to determine the fate of a project.

Now we have a highly available, virtualized system. We have architected enough capacity to easily run in the event of a single server failure. Are we more comfortable pushing the typical refresh cycles of servers? YES! If we're only refreshing from a fear of hardware failure, then used equipment should be an option considered. In two recent projects we've been able to go from 20ish servers to two servers without buying a single new server! We're reusing equipment from the organization in these cases, but that compares well to procuring used hardware.

Make sure when ordering that your hardware is identical to take advantage of the high availability features. SANs are still new enough to have limited availability on the used market. If you can knock $20k or $30k out of the upfront cost by using used servers, why not?

Microsoft has long offered a number of system management products. Recently these products have been grouped into the System Center family of products.   The founding members of the family were SCOM and SCCM.

·         System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is a highly extensible monitoring system. Because of its expandability SCOM can be configured to monitor an entire environment from network and server hardware to detailed monitoring of applications.

·         System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), formerly known as SMS, is a powerful system management product capable for end to end management of both servers and client.

Historically these products have been targeted at medium to large environments. While smaller environments could benefit from the enhanced management capabilities, they could rarely justify dedicating servers to host these products or the cost of the server software. However, newer additions to the System Center family combined with virtualization have altered the playing field to a point that smaller environments should re-evaluate the potential of System Center.

Virtualization is probably the biggest game changer for the small environment. On the one hand virtualization gives smaller environments the flexibility to host additional isolated servers, like system center servers, without requiring additional expensive hardware.  The downside to this freedom is the increase in the number of systems that need to be managed.  If virtualization is added to a small environment without additional systems management capabilities the potential for problems and poorly designed environments increases drastically.

Data Protection Manager (DPM) and Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) are the newer members of the System Center family.

·         DPM is Microsoft’s foray into the backup software market. More than just another multipurpose backup solution, DPM is designed by Microsoft specifically to backup Microsoft systems and applications using the new concept of continuous data protection.

·         VMM allows IT professionals enhanced management capabilities and centralized management of virtualized environments large and small. VMM can be combined with SCOM for even more functionality to ensure optimal placement of virtual workloads.

As smaller environments begin to build virtualized infrastructures, DPM and VMM can become powerful, indispensible tools. But the cost of licensing of these products individually would seem to keep them out of reach for these environments.  Microsoft has release a new license called System Center Server Management Suite that addresses this issue, puts System Center within reach of small environments, and will be the focus on the next post in this series.