Looking at a bear in the face and not sure what to do. We have 3 older Dell R610 servers that need to be replaced. We also need to do quite a few updates/upgrades, I think. I'm trying to make it as cost effective as possible without hampering future growth and/or making us do things all over again in a few months or a year. The main thing that is driving this is, we have ran into sluggishness with our current setup. We are running 3 RDS servers with a session broker doing the load balancing. 12 branches with 60+ users total are accessing them on a daily basis. Here are what I think we may need to upgrade at the moment:
- Dell R610 -> R430 or ?
- vSphere 4 -> 5.5
- Workstation 8 -> Workstation 11
- Equalogic firmware
- Win2k8 server -> Win2012 or Win 10
My initial thought was to just buy new servers and replace the old ones, but that would leave us with an old version of ESXi. Thanks to @scottalanmiller that idea was quickly removed from the options. Any helpful tips or suggestion on this? We are also looking for a consultant that maybe able to help us, but I wanted to see if any of you may have a experience in this area and could point me in a good direction.
I'm sure this isn't enough info, but please ask for more clarification or details.
Thanks