I am contemplating the virtualization of two of our physical servers: one ("Svr1") is a domain controller also used as a file server (despite best practices but because of budgetary constraints) and the other ("Svr2") runs a SQL-based database software.
The servers are old (2005) and probably any modern server, if correctly configured, could handle the load of both.
But it's all a matter of correctly configuring the host...
How would you determine the load placed on the future host?
Current operating system is Windows 2003 Server (on both) but we would probably upgrade to Windows 2008 (R2) given W2K3 is more or less obsolete and essentially unsupported. Or perhaps Windows 2012.
"Svr1" handles the current load quite nicely with two 2.8 Ghz processors (separate physical, not dual core) and 4 GB or RAM. Roughly 400 GB disk space total with about 50% still available.
"Svr2" has two 3.0 Ghz processors and 2 GB or RAM. We currently run SQL 2008 on this server and might continue to use SQL 2008 since we have the licenses for it (2008 R2 and above would require purchase of new licenses).
Using "Performance Alerts and Logs" on a third machine, I started monitoring the performance of "Svr1" from 7 AM to 6 PM (7:00 to 18:00) one day. This is one view of the result:
Yes, I should probably continue to monitor some more, since there might be more heavy use another day, but doesn't that look like very low use?
Also, are there other objects that I should monitor when planning a migration to Hyper-V?
How would you translate the results, once obtained, into recommended specs for the server running Hyper-V?
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