VMWare servers have arrived

Part of the joy I get from my career is the ability to play with new hardware. Yesterday I got to install VMWare ESX 4.0 on three brand new Dell R710 servers that were loaded with dual 2.93ghz quad core processors and 96gb of RAM with (12) gigabit NIC's in each box. This is all part of large in-house Disaster Recovery project where we will have two data centers that are separated by 2000 miles or so with a 100megabit point to point fiber connection. Two Dell PS6500E SAN's with 48tb raw capacity will be on each side and replicate the data to each other respectively. We will utilize VMWare VMotion to keep the hardware completely transparent and Site Recovery Manager to automatically bring up each data center to the respective hardware in the case of a complete failure. We are going to be able to reduce our physical server count down to 8 total servers for the entire enterprise which is pretty amazing and house our internal DR facilities. I am very excited about this project even though it is in the early stages but I must admit I am impressed so far with VCenter Server and Site Recovery Manager 4.0 - even the licensing aspect of everything has been a breeze to set up and configure. As I travel down this path I will be blogging more and more about this project as I find this topic extremely interesting. Stay tuned!