The super virtualization engineering team here at Dell recently upgraded the Dell Virtualization Advisor tool. This free, online tool prompts you to answer about 10 questions, and then it gives a detailed sizing of servers and storage. Additionally, it will list the available services that might be useful when implementing the proposed solution. The part that I really like is it is easy to go back and change your answers to some of the questions to see how they affect the proposed solution. For example, you can change your preferred storage from Fibre Channel to iSCSI.

In addition to support for VMware based solutions, it will now also provide Microsoft Hyper-V– and Citrix XenServer-based solutions as well. So for those that are interested in what is needed for a Hyper-V solution with high availability and "quick migration" the Virtualization Advisor tool can help. Additionally, if you want to get the specifications for a Xen Server solution with live migration and backup and recovery capabilities, the Advisor tool has a configuration recommendation.

The other new feature of the Virtualization Advisor tool is the ability to specify what workloads you will be running on the VMs, which makes the sizing more accurate. You are able to specify the number of test and dev, file servers, Web servers, domain controllers, DNS servers, and other servers you will be running as VMs.

Take advantage of the free advice.

Todd