XenServer Setup

[Soulfish]

Hey,

Currently looking at getting rid of an end of year surplus by taking Sun up on their "buy one get one free" server off, and half price SAN offer to both update our server hardware and to virtualise as many of our physical servers as possible.

The hardware we're looking at using is 4 x Sun Fire X4150 servers and a Sun 7110 SAN. The software we're currently looking at using Citrix XenServer Enterprise (or XenServer Essentials Enterprise when they eventually release it) for the HA, live motion, and workload balancing features that it would give us.

Each of the servers and the SAN comes with 4 x gigabit ethernet ports (lights out management is a separate port), but after talking to Dell they seem to recommend at least 6 and preferably 8 network ports per server when using iSCSI + virtualisation. For anyone that is using an iSCSI SAN and virtualised servers how many physical network ports do you have, and how have you set them up? Is the Dell recommendation correct, or is it overkill compared to the 4-ports that I already have?

Cheers,

John

[robknowles]

Hello,

Which reseller is doing the offer? I can't seem to find any mention of it on the Sun website.

Rob

[kmount]

Rob,

Sounds like Matching Grant. More info here.

Resellers wise, I know Cutter do matching grant as we had a quote before Christmas, but not sure about anyone else.

[Soulfish]

Hello,

Which reseller is doing the offer? I can't seem to find any mention of it on the Sun website.

Rob

The offer is the Matching Grant Program that kmount linked to. You can find the UK price list at http://uk.sun.com/specials/grantprog...ER_02MAR09.pdf. We're looking at getting our stuff from the Cutter Project, and Andy has been amazing at answering all the questions I can throw at him!

John

[Ric_]

@Soulfish: Sounds like a similar setup to mine. I currently have 2x Sun X4440 servers (16 cores in each and 32GB RAM) and I have these connected to a EMC AX100 SAN using fibre.

I've just bought a 7110 to attacg instead of the EMC kit (to get a bit more speed). My fibre HBAs are 2Gbit so I was planning on dedicating two NICs on each box to the iSCSI side of things and then using the remaining two NICs for network traffic.

I am currently using Citrix XenServer Enterprise with two NICs bonded for the virtual machines. With 6 servers on each host, the hosts have not broken a sweat and even during backups, the network usage is negligable.

At the end of the day, NICs are cheap so I can add more as I see the need.

[linescanner]

Hello,

Which reseller is doing the offer? I can't seem to find any mention of it on the Sun website.

Rob

Rob,

drop me a PM and I can fill you in on the details of how to use is.

There is a load of good kit on there, however it is first come first served and the pot is not bottomless.

Andy

[Soulfish]

@Soulfish: Sounds like a similar setup to mine. I currently have 2x Sun X4440 servers (16 cores in each and 32GB RAM) and I have these connected to a EMC AX100 SAN using fibre.

I've just bought a 7110 to attacg instead of the EMC kit (to get a bit more speed). My fibre HBAs are 2Gbit so I was planning on dedicating two NICs on each box to the iSCSI side of things and then using the remaining two NICs for network traffic.

I am currently using Citrix XenServer Enterprise with two NICs bonded for the virtual machines. With 6 servers on each host, the hosts have not broken a sweat and even during backups, the network usage is negligable.

At the end of the day, NICs are cheap so I can add more as I see the need.

That's exactly what I wanted to hear . Didn't want to purchase this all to suddenly find that actually I need to splash out another £500/server for extra network ports!

[EduTech]

We are also looking at going with "The Cutter Project", We went to a demo a few weeks ago now and could not fault it.. we just have the battle of convincing the Senior Miss Managment Team

Its good to be hearing positive comments...

James.

[cookie_monster]

Ric_ how are you backing up your 7110?