The environment I help administer has made some major investments in new (to us) technology in the last year and half, and I was the guy who made the majority of the decisions about what hardware to buy.

We have never dabbled in virtualization until now, and I am concerned that maybe some of the decisions I made in hardware were....suboptimal to put it nicely.

Most of what we serve now live on m610 blades with dual 10k SAS drives, and 12GB of RAM. For most, we went with L5630 procs (trying to keep our heat/power consumption under control, as our 'server room' is a converted office with barely adequate cooling). It's ok if you're laughing at this point :)

The storage I selected for all this is the AX4-5i. I opted to fill every shelf with 7200rpm 1TB SATA drives, because at the time this decision was made, maximum disk space per dollar was our priority.

I know that this is by no means a 'high performance' system, with 1GB iSCSI, and slow SATA drives.

Recently, some of our developers have sort of sprung their latest creations on us (does this happen in your environment?), and I'm finding that I

#1 don't know how to spec hardware for database driven web apps, and

#2 don't really know how to best utilize what I have, because this IS what I have, and I am stuck with it.

Our developers also (god love 'em) seem to prefer to work in bizarre, wildly diverse architectures, so having more than one such app live on the same server is out of the question in most cases. As an example, we have your typical AMP web apps, apache/postgreSql/python apps, web enabled filemaker apps, web enabled foxrpro, and recently we've been told we're going to support our very fist IIS/.NET/mssql app.

Because of this, I would really like to start virtualizing some of these apps. If I have enough processing power in one box to run 2 or 3, I'd rather do that than dedicate a server to an app that may see 100-1000 or so users connecting at a time.

Do I have hardware that can support this satisfactorily?

I know this is a very broad question, and without info on the actual level of intensity that these apps are going to get worked, it may be impossible to answer.

My biggest concern is this-

If I set up LUNs on the AX4-5i for virtual hard drives and storage, am I going to find that the combination of 1GB iSCSI links and slow SATA drives is simply not suitable? As I mentioned, nothing we host is really visible on a national, let alone world-wide level. I think it would be rare for anything we host to see more than 1000 concurrent connections.

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