I'm IT manager for a small company. We are looking to replace our collection of aging office servers running Windows 2003 and 1 x ESXi 4 with a new virtualized setup.
The plan was to run on ESXi 5.5:
- 1 x Windows 2012 VM - Domain Controller (New domain - old one is a mess)
- 1 x Windows 2012 VM - File storage and source control
- 1 x Windows 2012 VM - SQL server 2012 and IIS
- 1 x Windows 2012 VM - Telephone system (this will come later)
- Plus possibly 2 virtualized old windows 2003 machines (SQL 2005) currently on ESXi 4
- Possibly secondary Windows 2012 Domain controller on a separate low spec server (do we really need 2?)
- NAS device for backups with sync to cloud
I now have the hardware ready to setup and think our Developer Action Pack has us covered for software licensees. However I'm now thinking Hyper-v might be a better route for us, as we work primary with Microsoft systems (Windows, .NET, SQL server) and are looking to use some Azure services in the long term.
The only problem is I have no experience configuring Hyper-V and Windows 2012. Current hosting experience is working mostly with Windows 2003 / 2008 and ESXi 4. Unfortunately I don't have much time or money to get this up and running.