Best practices to virtualize Ubuntu servers?

Question

My company is a small startup with about 20 people. We plan to set up a bunch of Ubuntu servers:

1. A mail server running Zimbra;
2. A gateway running Zentyal;
3. A content sharing/management server running Alfresco;
4. A web server hosting our company's website;
5. An application server running Tomcat/MySQL hosting our internal business application;
6. A development server running Tomcat/MySQL/SVN for our software development team;
7. A domain controller server running Samba

We have two Dell rack servers:

1. PowerEdge R710, two Intel Xeon 5506 (Quad-core), 16GB RAM, 1TB HDD with RAID 0
2. PowerEdge R410, one Intel Xeon 5506 (Quad-core), 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD with RAID 0

We don't expect a lot of Internet tranfic/mail, but we do expect quite some load on the Alfresco server, since there are quite some fairly large Excel sheets need to be stored. So my question is: can I virtualize all the above servers and run them on our two Dell servers? If yes, what are the best practices? Thanks.

Answer 1

My personal preference is to run everything virtualized, leaving Dom0s almost exclusively for virtualization. You can even run virtualize your firewall (Zentyal I guess). setting network bridging appropriately.

I believe the hardware you have will suffice.

You can use Zentyal (or a second Zentyal) for the Samba PDC... and you can even have some directory replication options.