What vmware product to start

[brirus]

We have a midsize company that is going to virtualize several servers to start with.  We are thinking of going with the VMware Infrastructure Foundation Acceleration Kit, is that the way to go?  We will probably be over the 6 processor limit, will we just be able to buy more licenses for more processors as needed? 
My sales rep recommends this:
The enterprise kit is the only one that comes with 4 licenses (8 processors) and a full version of Virtual Center. The foundation kit comes with 3x foundation licenses, so you will not have the HA or VMotion functionality. You could get the foundation kit and add another a la cart foundation license. However, the VCMS that comes with the foundation kit is only good for managing three nodes. So, you would only be able to manage 3 of the 4 ESX hosts with that Virtual center.
I guess you could purchase the foundation kit, an extra foundation license, and then an upgrade from VCMS foundation to enterprise. List price on that is upgrade is $3,845. That way they would have 4x foundations license and an enterprise version of VCMS that can manage all four ESX hosts. That would be cheaper than a full blown Enterprise acceleration kit. Albeit, without the functionality of HA or VMotion.
It has been a while since my class with Doug but I am wondering if there is not a better way to go.  We do not really need HA or VMotion right away.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Brian

[Viperman]

If you are a fairly small company why do you need 4 ESX hosts.  We are currently running 3 Dell 2950 servers and have them nowhere near maxed out on RAM and we are hosting more than 75 VM's between the three of them.  I think you would probably be fine with 3 Servers and the foundation license.

[brirus]

Thanks much for the input, I guess we are just nervous about putting too many servers together and then having them bog down.  Good to hear from someone who is not trying to sell me some enterprise package that costs more than our equipment.  We plan on running 3 2950's with 32gb of Ram would that be sufficient, would they need more than 2 network cards?  I know from class the minimum was 4 network cards, but wondered if that was true.
Thanks,
Brian

[Viperman]

Do they "require" more NICs?  No.  It is always good to build in redundancy with multiple NICs.  The general rule of thumb is to always have 6 NICs.  2 for the Service Console, 2 for the VMkernel, and 2 for the VM Port Groups.  I just bought 3 quad port NIC of of Ebay that fit 2950's.  I got them for $86, $87 and $94 each. 

What are you using for a SAN - FC or iSCSI?

[brirus]

Right now we don't have attached storage, that is the next decision we will have to make.  Our budget is pretty tight right now but we wanted to go with the compellent storage device with FC.  That may be a little pricey for us and we will probably fall back on iSCSI.  What are your thoughts?
Thanks for all the input,
Brian

[armourbl]

I'm brand new to the forum, but I can maybe help with you question about Compellent.

I had to do a lot of research and look at option for a SAN. We already had a Compellent system, but knew that we'd be looking at an upgrade of the system, as well as purchase another unit for a replica site. There were some attractive options out there, but we decided to stick with Compellent because of the way they manage storage. They do charge for each feature, and because of this it looks expense on paper, but you do get a lot for you money. There are a lot of value added services that they don't charge for as well. For example, I have a local engineer from Compellent assigned to me who frequently comes out to my site to offer help and guidenance at no extra charge.

If you can afford it, go FC and go with a SAN that allows for virtual storage.

Hope this helps. I am in the same boat as you in some regard. I need to decide on how many servers to purchase for my VM environment. My boss is driving for 4 servers, but I know that I can run it easily on less. For us, it is coming down to peace of mind, as well as DR and second site considerations.

ben

[brirus]

Thanks for the input, we hate to start out on the wrong when building something that will be running years from now. 
Brian