[Coco] For the love of an OS.

[Aaron Wolfe]

>
> As for consolidation, we've been able to trim down 12 datacenters of
> about 60 servers, with 6 of those being paired windows clusters with HP
> MSA500 clusters, down to (4) HP DL380 G7 hosts (2x 6-core Xeons, 72GB
> RAM, 4x300GB SAS drives in RAID5), (2) HP/Lefthand P4500 7.2TB (12x600GB
> SAS drives in RAID5) mirrored SANs , and (2) Cisco 3750 switches.
>
>From 3 full racks, down to half (or less) of a single rack.

we're well off topic here, but.. did you actually save any money once
you paid licensing, support & maintenance for the virtualization
software, trained/certified your staff, etc?  if you had an adequate
san in place already, maybe.  if you have to replace or add a san,
you're almost definitely spending more than if you'd have just stuck
with classic servers, or used virtualization in a few "sweet spots"
rather than site wide.   maybe your case is different than the norm,
but I've had several clients regret the move to vmware... or more
accurately the management regretted it.  The techs love it, makes life
easy for them.