A server consolidation scenario

["Jeff Crosby" <jlcrosby@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

All,

One of the very best uses for these midrange.com lists for me, is a place to
bounce ideas to see what others think of their viability.  As I've said many
a time, being a single person shop, it has been a godsend for me.  So here I
go again.

I'm planning a bit of server consolidation in 3-5 months and wondered what
some of you think of the following.  I've already compared the following to
IXS and iSCSI solutions and found that external rack mounted will be much
more affordable.

1) We're going to virtualize 2 W2008 Servers, each having a core server that
hosts 2 virtualized server instances.  The only thing the core server will
do is host the virtualized servers.  All other work will be in one of the
virtualized instances.  Each is powerful enough that if there is a hardware
issue on one of the servers, it's virtualized instances could be deployed on
the other without problems, save for a little performance degradation,
obviously.  Anyone used Hyper-V yet?

2) I'm getting quotes on both Dell and IBM 2U rack servers.  The Dell quote
is in (from the consultant who will be implementing it along with me, no
matter what hardware I get) and is very intriguing to me in it's setup.  He
has configured 6 hard drives in it:  (2) 146gb drives that will be a mirror
set, having ONLY the core server instance of W2008 Server on them, and (4)
300gb drives that will be a RAID 10(*) set.  This is supposed to be better
performance-wise than RAID 5.  It is new to me, so I cannot vouch for that.
Anyone have experience with RAID 10?  Is this overkill?

3) Regarding backup, we have 2 3581 LTO2 drives on the System i.  Other than
when we're doing tape duplication, one of these could be used for these
servers.  (I don't know if there's such a thing as an A/B switch for a tape
drive.  I don't like the idea of plugging and unplugging it's cable,
though.)  However, the consultant had an intriguing idea:  One of these
virtualized server instances will be a terminal services server, replacing
the existing IXS we have for that purpose.  Since the existing IXS then
basically has no purpose in life, why not use it to store backup images of
each of the virtualized servers?  Does this sound doable or reasonable?
What's bad about this idea?

Thanks.


(*) RAID 10 in this configuration is drives 3 & 4 are striped together,
drives 5 & 6 are striped together, and then the "drive 3/4 set" is mirrored
to the "drive 5/6 set".  The result is the OS sees 300gb usable space.  Make
sense?