Virtual Machines vs. Physical for starting a company or a remote office

1.        Say your company is building out an office of 20-30 people or starting a company of that size and you need all the proper technology tools 

2.       E-mail, 2 application servers with 2 databases and a few web servers. 2 file servers, 20-30 desktops. 2 misc servers. Phone, firewall, anything else? Beside the misc items that are always needed to be physical like switches.

3.       Get 2-3 Sun servers for the vmware esx server or a cheaper brand.

4.       1 san using iscsi for price.

5.       1 cheaper server for exchange like a 5k Dell since it likes to be physical.

6.       Using thin clients with vdi for desktops and laptops. Bigger wyse laptops for people who need office installed for the road but still using vdi. If anyone is using Photoshop remotely they will need an actual laptop.

7.       Using a software phone switch with voip phones

8.       Also an isa firewall with the software instead of buying any all in one hardware boxes.

9.       Plus all this stuff would be so much easier to manage it can all be done on one virtual infrastructure client including all desktop helpdesk, patches, and installs.

10.   Theoretically you could have this all outsource and the people could all do the maintenance remotely and save a ton of money in face time with techs.

11.   Last if your company grows quickly it would be 1000% times easier to upgrade by adding Virtual Machines and eventually an on staff It guy could do so much more.

12.   Not to mention the cost of backup of any of this would be a lot cheaper because you could use esxranger  and off load the data off site at night. This would also give you a dr plan for free.  You would not need something like backup exec or other software with tape until the company grows quite a bit more and the bandwidth can’t handle the data going offsite. 

General White Papers on Virtilizaiton

Located at the VMware site there are bunch of PDFs on the basics to more advance virtualization topics.

http://www.vmware.com/solutions/whitepapers/virtualization.html 

If anyone has created a summary or want to make up cliff notes of the white paper please post the white paper title, the link to the white paper. Then copy and paste your summary into the blog post or upload as an image if you like. 

Anyone read any good White Papers or articles they would like to summaries and discuss?

It be sweet if some people who read some VMware white papers wanted to post them and we can discuss add stuff etc. Also general discussion technology post are welcome as well. 

If you are going to post about a certain White Paper please, copy it into the post, link it, or upload it as a picture.