VMware vSphere Journey

We are about to embark on our vSphere journey and the initial pilot project will be migrating some Physical Linux and Windows servers located in our Paris office sitting on CX3-10's and moving these to a Virtual vSphere environment in our UK office, which will be deployed on our CX3-40 in our UK Datacentre. Currently the amount of Storage in use in our Paris office is about 2TB and we are running VMware collector and starting our analysis.

I am looking for some high level pointers, experiences on, any good docs, case studies

1. Migrating these Physical servers both Linux and Windows (P2V) to our Virtual  environment and tools to use, speed, outage if any. Currently all we have between our Paris and UK Datacentres is a IP Link.

2. Backup options, should we clone, snap, we have both a Veritas Netbackup and TSM Tape environments, currently no VTL.

3. Performance going forward and scalability. We expect our Virtual environment to grow rapidly  with many Windows Physical environments being virtualized. Should we move SQL to Virtual. sharepoint and some guidelines around this.

4. Storage layout. I am looking to layout the Storage optimally, should I create seperate VMFS Boot Luns, seperate swap luns, and how should I look to layout out my Storage Luns with a view to Clone and Snap individual VM's in the future.

5. Networking Requirements, e.g Separate VLANs for Vmotion, Prod, test, managemnet etc.

4. Finally DR, possibly with SRM and setting up Mirrorview on our UK CX3-40 CX's and asynchronously replicating our vSphere Virtual environment.

Thanks for any responses.

Andy