I got transferred from an elementary school to an adult education center. They tasked me to take care or be in charge of the server room. They have 8 physical servers and one domain controller which we do not control,,the district takes care of that one.
Most of the servers are older with 3-5 72.8 gb hard drives, configured with RAID 5 and windows server 2003. 2 of the servers are dell r510's with 5 1tb hard drives also configured with RAID5 and windows server 2008 R2. These are running Wmware server 2.02 with 3 servers running on each. For backup, they use a free software called fbbackup. They have copies of the wmware vm files copied to to other servers and they have backups done with fbbackup scattered around many servers. they also have a few nas devices holding copies of the same backups they have scattered about the other servers.
My first IT job was at the elementary school and did not gain any experience with servers or virtualization..There was only the domain controller and a windows 2000 application and file server.
So after reading here in Spiceworks about OBR10 and virtualization and googling things and reading about these subjects I decided to buy backup software and virtualize.
I bought SorageCraft Shadow Protect software for the physical servers and for the virtual machines. I bought a Synology Nas 411 that has raid to store the backups. I got rid of the fbbackup software and deleted most of the repetitious backups I found all over the place.
I decided to use the 2 R510 servers as Hyper-V hosts and move the physical servers to virtual machines. So I moved the 3 VMware virtual machines from one R510 to the other temporarily. I then had one r510 free to prepare. I added more hard drives and memory. I configured RAID as OBR10 and installed windows server 2012 with Hyper-V role. OS installed on the one big drive with no extra partitions created. I am not sure if this ok or if I should have created another partition to hold the VMs files,,separate from the OS. I then converted the 6 VMware machines from the other R510 to vhd and transferred them to the newly configured server.
I repeated the process on the other R510 and converted the physical servers to vhd using the Shadowprotect backups.
So I have now 2 servers running everything virtualized. But now I am nervous.
I have all the vms backed up individually but I do not have the servers hosting the VMs backed up.
Why, because the Synology I bought is almost full. So if I back up the hosts, it will backup all the vmfiles from all the virtual machines and there is no space for that. I will buy another Synology to backup the 2 hosts and all the vms but in the meantime,,if for some reason I lose either of the R510 servers i will get calls from all over the place unlike when i had the physical servers where only one might go down at a time.
I could recover by creating new virtual machines in the other server and use the shadowprotect recovery disk to restore each individual vm but it would take a long time as compared to restoring only one server.
Anyways, i would like input on what i have done up to now,,where i have messed up and what can i do to make it better.