Product advice

[JDMorecraft]

My company is looking to turn 10+ physical servers into ~2 physical boxs onsite and a backup server at a co-op locatioin.  We are looking to have our downtime to as close to 0 as possible and would like to have a snapshot of our physical servers placed onto a temporary machine to run durring the initial setup (as the DC is less than 5 months old and will be our primary VM server) until the DC snapshot can be placed onto the VM server.

What products are needed to have VM setup on a temp Win7 machine and be able to grab a snapshot of our physical DC (running 2008 R2) and run this snapshot durring the install of VM, then be able to transfer the snapshot to the VM server.

Paid, trials or free does not matter at this point

Any help is appreciated.

[bragazzi]

Good questions!  First, I strongly suggest not P2V-ing a Domain Controller, they almost never work right afterwards.  To get around this, I suggest building a new server VM and promoting it to a DC.  Also, the DC VM should be configured to use an external NTP server and set the strata in the registry to 0x1.  It sounds like you do not want to purchase addition hardware at this time, if that's the case, you'll want to evaluate the hardware you have to determine which will make the best. 2 or 3 hosts.  For products, I suggest vSphere Essentials Plus.  That'll get you licenses for 6 sockets, vMotion and HA.  For the DR aspect, I'd either use Veeam or VDR to make a transportable backup.

[JDMorecraft]

Yes we are going to reuse the server that we purchased 5 months ago (that already has our DC including AD, DHCP and DNS) and a server that is a few years old that will only run a few AD monitoring tools and a small web server.  The DC backup and fileserver backup will be running on a new server at a co-op location.

We were trying to avoid the potential downtime of turning off the primary DC and rebuilding it on a newly formatted VM server.  Sounds like ill be building a temp server to safeguard against downtime or hope I can acronis the current system to another box for a while.

Thanks for your help.

[cjscol]

If you didn't want to use the new server destined for the co-op locaton temporarily at you main site to build the new virtual DC and then migrate it to the existing DC hardware, once you had retired the existing DC and rebuilt its hardware with ESXi, then you could use the free VMware Player on an existing windows server with spare capacity to create the new virtual DC.  Once the new virtual DC has been created you can retire your original DC, rebuild the hardware with ESXi and then migrate the new virtual DC to this ESXi host.

As bragazzi suggested vSphere Essentials Plus is perfect if your requirement is for 3 hosts with a maximum of 2 CPUs per host.