My boss (aka brother) has been tossing an idea around with his boss and finally has let me in on the secret and has asked me for my point of view. He wants to virtualize ALL apps in our environment.

Current Situation
We currently have our HQ location, and 3 branch locations. We recently (this weekend) implemented MPLS instead of P2P T-1's from our HQ to Branch Locations. The 3 branch locations currently use Citrix to work, while our HQ does not.

Proposed situation & why!
One of our Apps (our main app if you will) is limited to 32-bit OS therefore in order for our Citrix users to use it the Citrix server was put on a 2003 server via Hyper V in a 2008 R2. Now, with putting a 32-bit OS on Hyper V there are limitations. We can only push 2 processors and 4GB of RAM... which the Citrix Server bogs down upon lots of usage. The 2008R2 machine has dual quad cores and 10GB of RAM so we started thinking outside the box to utilize more of our system resources to prevent bogging down. We will virtualize our main app using a VMware product and then switch Citrix to a 64-bit OS allowing us to use ALL the 2008 R2's system specs... sounds nice!

Possible future Situation
Upon further discussion we talked about possibly virtualizing ALL apps for ALL locations (not just Citrix users)

My question
Has anyone/does anyone currently do this? What are the pro's and con's? I can talk to my brother but he is pretty set in his idea and I don't want to step on his toes but I want to present both sides IF need be.

I actually am keeping this simple for the time being as I need to RDP into some stuff for work right now but will be on later to endulge and specify more.

I appreciate any insight!

P.S. Any word on Novell product patents and AttachMate wants/needs?

Anybody?

What are ALL the apps involved and how are they currently accessed.

As you know I'm a VMware vSphere man, not actually used HyperV at all, so you never know.

Any budget for this or the usual beer and pretzels ;)

What I mean by all the Apps is all our in-house Apps, Outlook, & Microsoft Suite.

They are currently accessed through the following:

Word
Local copy (pushed through zenworks)

Outlook
Local copy (pushed through zenworks)

Apps
Accessed via mapped network drive(s)

We have budgeted for the virtualizing our main App.

Rick,

We run a VMware ESX environment and are continually migrating physical to virtual as time goes on. More of the apps are starting to live in the virtualized environment. We have come across VERY few apps that won't work in a VM and most of those have to do with vendor "certification" more so than for technical reasons. There are some apps that can benefit from a physical server (e.g. large enterprise databases).

We currently have 65 servers running ESX 4.1 and on those we have roughly 665 VM's. We still have around 400 physical servers running various legacy apps as well as large database servers. One of my physical servers has 12 CPU's, 16GB RAM, 1T SAS storage and runs nearly 100% CPU on all 12 cores all the time. Something like that won't run very well virtualized (we tried and it was Slooooowwww).

Other servers that we have that use dedicated hardware is our Exchange environment. It currently houses over 15,000 accounts and those are very busy servers which are clusters across a number of servers.

We do run a very large Cirtrix environment for medical applications. Most of that is on dedicated servers but we have already investigated running in a VM and are starting to migrate in that direction. So far it seems to have been the right decision though the cost ROI is debatable.

Things that will bite you in a VM environment is your I/O. That's disk I/O as well as network I/O. NAS vs. SAN CIFS vs NFS vs iSCSI all depend on the type of application you will need to run. Some work better than others. Your connectivity to the ESX host also plays a big difference. You will be bound by hardware limitations and pure packets per second capabilities. We currently run multi-gig links aggregated and are about to go to 10Gig connections only for our ESX hosts. Your mileage may vary depending on your size and requirements.

Hope that helps. If you have more specific questions please fire away and if I don't have the answer I'll check with my work.

Thank You for the response.

We too run Citrix and I have been waiting for someone else who is knowledgeable to ask questions... YAY

Secondly, we are FAR smaller than your environment. 120 users total, 4 locations, 10 servers total.

Today we got our main in house app (TAM) virtualized using VMware product. We have tested the virtual app and it runs to par with our physical version. Tomorrow we will be putting this on a 64-bit OS (mind you the App [pre virtual] was only 32-bit compatible. I will update as soon as we get an answer.

I spoke with my boss about virtualizing ALL the apps for ALL locations again and he assured me it most likely won't happen. The other day he was just saying what we COULD do with this VMware product.

So as it stands right now we will only be virtualzing TAM for our Citrix users. Again, this is to utilize our servers full capabilities. So far it looks promising.

You're welcome... We too at one point were speaking in terms of "COULD do" as well. Before we knew it deploying any application is now assumed to be virtual unless there is a compelling reason to go physical. So watch out... that "COULD" is more loaded than you realize :)

Can I ask what type of AV you run?

I hate to assume... do you mean what type of Anti-Virus does my company use? If so we use McAfee as the primary AV for the Windows environment. We also have email gateways that also filter and perform AV functions for all email regardless of the destination OS. I don't believe there is a common AV solution for either Linux/MacOSX. In many cases those platforms do not use AV.