Hey everyone! We're looking to refresh our IT setups in a couple of remote offices—one with 50 users and another with 100. Currently, we have two VMware ESXi hosts (using the vSphere Essentials kit) and shared storage in both locations. There are about 7-8 virtual machines on each setup, with one being a large file share that exceeds 10 TB. Backups are handled by Veeam and stored on a high-capacity NAS in a nearby office. Since our current hardware is over six years old, we're considering our options to upgrade while keeping the costs reasonable, especially in light of the current Broadcom licensing conditions. We could either get new hardware with Standard licenses like we have now, consolidate everything onto a single large ESXi node with standard licensing plus a mirrored standby, or move the large file shares to Azure Files while maintaining some local infrastructure. We're looking for your suggestions and insights! Thanks!
1 Answer
I've done a lift and shift to Hyper-V for a client before, and it worked out well! If you're planning to replace the hardware, you can migrate VMs one at a time without much hassle since they'll run side by side initially. Just a heads up though—if you go with Azure Files, be mindful of your internet connection. While it's reliable for general tasks, the speed differences compared to local storage can impact performance depending on what your users are doing.
Yes, exactly! The current hardware is quite old and doesn't have local storage. Latency should be around 40-50 ms to the cloud, with pretty good bandwidth.