This is a matter of opinion but I'm looking for some advice regarding an upcoming migration of physical servers to the cloud. I'm looking for some perspective - any opinions are welcome.
Scenario: Migrate 15 Application Servers and 4 Database Clusters to the Cloud
We are a small shop hosting a few dozen high traffic websites. Here is the inventory list:
- 8 Front-End Webservers (Server 2008 SP2 - IIS 7.0)
- 3 Indexing servers (SOLR - one master, two slaves for load balancing)
- 2 Media servers (APache Linux - millions of small image files, about 2.8TB volume, 2TB full)
- 2 Application servers (legacy applications on server 2003 - low traffic)
- 4 active/passive database clusters (Server 2008, SQL 2008 - high traffic)
A few more details about the setup:
- All servers are physical, we are looking to use virtualization (VMWare ESXi - strong in house experience with this product)
- The 15 application servers can all be virtualized in my opinion. Do you recommend virtualizing databases? I have many mixed opinions on this. The goal is to have the ability to horizontally scale from the active passive model to having three or four active nodes (using Enterprise SQL)
- Would you consolidate 4 database clusters into one large one? Why or why not? There are four different products on each cluster which were acquired over time - perhaps it's better to "put all the eggs in one basket?" Or not, open to opinions.
Vendors?
For this size, we are considering Rackspace, Amazon, IBM and private (co-locating in a datacenter using VMWare ESXi in HA configuration - two large hosts, a SAN, etc).
What would you do?
Thank you for your time.
Mike