VMware SMB Designs

My first “real” post! So my job day to day is to design out solutions for customers, one of the biggest things I run into are small business’s who have heard the good word of virtualization or attended a show or something that has sparked their interest.

One problem… Budgets. Usually these companies have not budgeted for this type of solution, so of course we are glad to lay out a design, run capacity planner reports, and get an idea of what their business needs are. Then we put the best design out first and usually mouths hang open at the price tag.

With the Proper Microsoft licensing, VMware Licensing, SAN Storage, redundant switches etc etc, we start talking 6 figures pretty fast. That part apparently was not explained at that show they went to 😉 so usually I have to scale back and design out the best solution so that it can be implemented in phases. So the goal is to protect the customers data, get really good uptime, low RTO/RPO while making it easier for the customer to lay out a multi year plan for implementation.

I have uploaded 4 designs that I have put together, mostly I’m looking for peer review and suggestions of what others are doing. I do not guarantee that these designs are flawless, but I’m merely looking to improve my design quality while also sharing ideas with everyone else so that they might help their customers as well. I have tried to keep everything vendor neutral as possible, but i really like the Veeam solution so i just spelled that out in the design. Obviously even though there are 4 phases they do not all apply to all customers, its purely based on their business needs.

Let me know what you think!

Phase1
Phase2
Phase3
Phase4

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3 Responses to "VMware SMB Designs"

  1. Justin,

    I just stumbled on this site and have a quick question on these options. I realize you use DFS between sites. Does that mean you have 2 Active Directory Sites? Or are they completely separate environments? Do they need to be on the same domain? Could the backup servers be 2 “workgroup based” only machines? Thank you for your informative site.

  2. From my understanding you need to have both servers joined to an active directory domain. This is because of the required security handshakes that take place.

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