I must report to our CFO whose main interest and focus is finance, not IT.
I know we should upgrade our servers and SAN and I would like ideas and suggestions on how to justify it beyond the following valid reasons:
1) Two servers are almost 5 years old but they are already outdated and not on the HCL -- HP DL390 G5 servers with DDR2 RAM, which is barely made/sold now. They are almost ready for a new round of CarePacks, too...same for the SAN.
2) The SAN remains on the HCL but needs a complete new set of disks to accommodate future storage -- though the exisiting disks are 300GB 15k drives. 600 or 900 GB drives are possible but they are only 10k drives, reducing available IOPS. The SAN is an HP P2000 G3 iSCSI which is otherwise fine. It could be repurposed to a DR site.
3) One server is an HP DL360 G7 which could conitinue as a host server if need be...
4) The servers are not in a true N+1 setup -- if the G7 dies, the two G5s cannot handle all the existing VMs, even with the absolute minimum quantity of VMs running. One G5 + G7 might work...
5) Upgrading to more current hardware enables using newer VMware features...
7) We are getting nearer the SAN's storage limits, though no over-provinsioning messages have appeared, and as many VMs as possible are thin provisioned, but VMs and appliances seems to grow larger over time...
8) We are on VMware 5.0 U2, we would skip to 5.5...
What other things should I consider and discuss to justify upgrading??
I'm sure I'm missing a lot of things to discuss...
Thank you, Tom