Question : Infrastructure Conversion to VMWare

I need help in possbile solutions and ways of how to convert one our client to a complete new infrastructure.  Here is the situation that we are faced with.  Our customer bought a SBS 2008 from another IT company which has Windows Server 2008 FE on it.  Lots of limitations.  They currently utilize Exchange and are doubling in size in the next few months.  There are a total of 5 servers on site. 1 SBS 2008, 4 Server Standards.  Here are the server breakdowns

1 SBS 2008 - Just what it does (On domain)
1 Server - Hosts 10 Website, Intranet (disjoined from Domain)
1 Server - Hosts Database with over 65 million records and constantly increasing (disjoined from domain)
1 Server - Development (Websites, Internal Applicaitons) (disjoined from domain)
1 Server - File, 2 website (on domain)

There servers are running slow, lack of memory, hard drives and all need replacement.  I am proposing a new solution for virtualization.  We are wanting to put in VMWare, new server, SAN but we are fairly new to virtualization.  Any advise, documents, VMWare Converter, sites to lead us in the correct direction would be greatly appreciate, or if anyone has gone throught this process.  

Lastly, we are removing the SBS server and putting in a Server 2008 Standard with Exchange 2010.

Answer : Infrastructure Conversion to VMWare

Well budget is the key. If you are limited on budget, you can use ESXi (free version) otherwise, ESX 4 (Vsphere). More physical host or number of CPU sockets will cost you a lot more for licenses if you want to use ESX4. The advantage of ESX4 is you can join your host in VC, cluster so the administration and maintenance would be easier with Vmotion, Storage vmotion....

ESXi does not have luxury features but it works fine for all basic functionality.  You can host as many servers as you want for no license fee. (you will see license fee costs you a lot). You can have more physical servers (hosts) if you want more performance. You just have to log on individually host's virtual center to manage your vms.

If you have more $$ you can run ESX4 and take advantage of all high availability features and clustering...

K