Finding server solutions on SME scale

Giftand · May 24

Hi folks

I'm hoping you smart IT guys can offer me some guidance. My company will be needing to do a server upgrade in the next 18 months and I want to start looking into what we should do.

Currently we're running a single physical server that's got 3 virtual VMware machines running. We've got 3 windows machines running on there including a domain controller, management server and an app server.

Then our PC's just connect to the domain and group policies are pulled through and all that and storage and backups are done on the server.

We're only 9 users and we're not running anything that's resource intensive. Graphic design and video editing(which isn't done often) is just done on more powerful desktops.

I've always been of the opinion that this whole system is kind of overkill for the size of our company. In light of VMware pretty much not being an option anymore after the price hikes, what the heck do we do?

Our IT contractor has been going hard on Nutanix but is expecting us to fork out over 400k(South African money - works out about $19k US) for a cluster and then still pay a monthly fee of like 40k-ish which is just mad for a small company like us. I mean this is just the infrastructure and not all the other software we have to pay for.

In the past we just had a terminal server that everyone RDP's into and everything just happened there. I guess that's not gold standard anymore but frankly we had way fewer issues back then. I spend my days dealing with IT crap that should just work.

In short my question is. You've got a small distribution company with 9 Computer users running windows, office and some accounting and warehousing software that has to run locally. You need to setup fresh IT infrastructure. What do you invest in without going bankrupt?

TIA

leadeater · May 24

41 minutes ago, Giftand said:

Our IT contractor has been going hard on Nutanix but is expecting us to fork out over 400k(South African money - works out about $19k US) for a cluster and then still pay a monthly fee of like 40k-ish which is just mad for a small company like us. I mean this is just the infrastructure and not all the other software we have to pay for.

I have used Nutanix, great product but not suited to your situation in my opinion.

I would be looking at Microsoft 365 and Azure Entra and join all your computers to that which will give you the same functionality as Active Directory on-prem but it's Cloud hosted by Microsoft so you can manage devices fully no matter where they are so long as they have internet access. You won't need internet access to login etc as policies and credentials will be cached for offline usage where required.

As for your application server, that can just be a physical server not virtualized in any way and can also act as a file server. Back it up with something like Backblaze.

19k USD for a cluster is pretty cheap though, not sure why that extra monthly support cost exists though.

Giftand · May 24

55 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I have used Nutanix, great product but not suited to your situation in my opinion.

I would be looking at Microsoft 365 and Azure Entra and join all your computers to that which will give you the same functionality as Active Directory on-prem but it's Cloud hosted by Microsoft so you can manage devices fully no matter where they are so long as they have internet access. You won't need internet access to login etc as policies and credentials will be cached for offline usage where required.

As for your application server, that can just be a physical server not virtualized in any way and can also act as a file server. Back it up with something like Backblaze.

19k USD for a cluster is pretty cheap though, not sure why that extra monthly support cost exists though.

Thank you this is great advice. Feels like a less overkill solution. We're using 365 already so that feels like step in the right direction.

One more question. as far as business continuity. I'm guessing using a none-virtual environment doesn't leave us with much of an option to spin up a server in the cloud using something like backblaze?