Windows Centro is the codename for Windows Essential Business Server.  I think it’s a very cool offering.  Take the fully fledged products of Exchange 2008, SQL 2008, System Center and wrap them up on 4x Windows Server 2008 installs.  Codename Centro comes in at $7200 USD (about $7500 AUD) and scales to 300 users.

So I’ve been doing some "field testing" with Centro and configuring 7x VM roles across 3x physical hosts using VMware VI3.  I’m using the Microsoft official system requirements and some fairly vanilla resource pools; It’s all working really well.  The VI3 install was easy, installing Centro on top of that was straight forward. 

Everything is humming along quite nicely. My seven Virtual Machines so far are (a mix of x64 and 32 bit):

  1. DRS stockartCentro Management Server
  2. Centro Messaging Server
  3. Centro Security Server
  4. Centro Database Server
  5. Microsoft Terminal Server
  6. Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server
  7. VMware Virtual Center

I’m toying with the idea of adding a Web Server VM in a DMZ, I’ll need to make a few snazzy changes to my virtual switches;  Cool huh?

It’s a pretty sweet setup - my plan is to have enough capacity left over to use VMware Lab Manager to create an identical copy of all the whole environment on the same hardware.  If I put the copy in it’s own resource pool, I can have a full test environment.  So it’s constantly updated without incurring a performance or storage hit.  I think it’ll hit a sweet spot!!

Once I get it all sorted in a few weeks I’ll post back.