Risk when deploying virtualized production servers without in-house virtualization expertise?
I've been asked to evaluate moving three production servers to a virtualization platform. The servers currently run Windows Server 2003 with a mix of applications that, given a catastrophic failure, could tolerate up to 1-2 days of downtime - but certainly not on a regular basis.
My concern is that there is a lack of in-house expertise in this area. The day-to-day support is handled by a (primarily) developer-focused team, with secondary support from the institution's help desk and then vendor support as needed with about a 24 hour response SLA.
Given this type of scenario, would you have any concerns running either Hyper-V or ESX as opposed to separate physical machines?
Solution 1:
Of course I would have concerns. The answer is "Yes, there's a whole lot of risk." Would you let a teenager, who's worked on desktops but never worked on server hardware, come in and manage your datacenter? And having no one with server experience to train him?
You can :
Accept the risks and hope your guys learn on the job quickly, without requiring too many disasters
Send one or more to a class on your particular VM technology
Also - who the hell is going to architect this, if you don't have anyone experienced in-house? This is exactly what consultants/contractors are good at. Have someone who knows their stuff come in, evaluate what you want, fill in the gaps, do it, and train your guys with the basics. And send someone to school, too, unless you want to lean on the contractor every time the power hiccups.
Solution 2:
It is much easier to maintain virtual servers. 99% of the time you don't have to worry about drivers etc. Further more you are not dependent on old physical servers. I would virtualize the 3 servers and spent a few days playing around with ESXi or HyperV. VMware is very easy to use, and you don't need to learn command line. There is a small learning curve, however the time spent is totally worth it.