{"id":1166,"date":"2008-08-28T08:00:02","date_gmt":"2008-08-28T08:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/08\/microsoft-infrastructure-architecture-considerations-part-7-data-centre-consolidation.htm"},"modified":"2008-08-28T08:00:18","modified_gmt":"2008-08-28T08:00:18","slug":"microsoft-infrastructure-architecture-considerations-part-7-data-centre-consolidation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/08\/microsoft-infrastructure-architecture-considerations-part-7-data-centre-consolidation.htm","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft infrastructure architecture considerations: part 7 (data centre consolidation)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the last few days, I’ve written a series of posts on the architectural considerations for designing a predominantly-Microsoft IT infrastructure, based on the MCS Talks: Enterprise Infrastructure series<\/a>. Just to summarise, the posts so far have been:<\/p>\n

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  1. Introduction<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  2. Remote offices<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  3. Controlling network access<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  4. Virtualisation<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  5. Security<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  6. High availability<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In this final infrastructure architecture post, I’ll outline the steps involved in building an infrastructure for data centre consolidation. In this example the infrastructure is a large cluster of servers to run a virtual infrastructure; however many of the considerations would be the same for a non-clustered or a physical solution:<\/p>\n

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    1. The first step is to choose build a balanced system – whilst it’s inevitable that there will be a bottleneck at some point in the architecture, by designing a balanced system the workloads can be mixed to even out the overall demand – at least, that’s the intention. Using commodity hardware it should be possible to provide a balance between cost and performance using the following configuration for the physical cluster nodes:\n