tmcd35 Posted July 16, 2014 Posted July 16, 2014 I need to start thinking about a new server for September. A bit different to my usual servers whose spec's tend to read "max out CPU cores and RAM". So I thought I'd see what recommendations you guys have. Here's the spec: £7,500 budget. Primary file server. Windows 2012. Data store for live Hyper-V VHD images. Shared folders for public files, home folders, profiles, app-data, etc. Thinking of using Server 2012's Storage Spaces Would like to properly support Volume Shadow Copies and File Server Resource Manager Hyper-V Replica and ReFS would be nice We currently have a File Server running Windows 2008R2 with just over 4Tb space in a RAID-50 configuration. I would like to repurpose that old server to run Server 2012 supporting both Hyper-V Replica and/or DFS shares with the new server. What can/should I be buying for this?
tmcd35 Posted July 16, 2014 Author Posted July 16, 2014 (edited) Just got a very appealing quote for @ICTDirect_Dave. He's kindly allowed me to share the specs for more discussion: Spec as follows: 2 x W3680 3.33GHz Hex Core Xeon 144GB DDR3 10600R ECC RAM (18 x 8GB) 16 x 450GB SAS HDD 10K 6G Dual Port P410 Raid Controller With BBWC - I've got some funky attachments that allow for an external sas that I could add on to this for a bit more also 2 x PSU Rails 2 years RTB Warranty as standard My first thoughts are to (atleast) half the CPU and Ram and up the hard drives to 15krpm. Our current server is quad core, 6Gb Ram and 16x15k rpm 450Gb SAS drives. I then got thinking about the RAID controller. What do I want here? Do I even need a RAID controller with Storage Spaces? And of course the questions over SSD's. And drive allocation - OS vs Hyper-V store vs Home folder file server. Should the home folders be moved into a VM? Should I move to iSCSI instead of SMB v3 folder shares? Edited July 16, 2014 by tmcd35
ICTDirect_Dave Posted July 16, 2014 Posted July 16, 2014 One thing I didn't realise when I put this together is that those CPUs will only take 24GB RAM each. You'd need something like the X5670 (2.93GHz HEX) that can see up to 288GB instead. My bad...
tmcd35 Posted July 16, 2014 Author Posted July 16, 2014 One thing I didn't realise when I put this together is that those CPUs will only take 24GB RAM each. You'd need something like the X5670 (2.93GHz HEX) that can see up to 288GB instead. My bad... Lol, you're going in the wrong direction! I'd be happy with 4Gb Ram!
ICTDirect_Dave Posted July 16, 2014 Posted July 16, 2014 haha! Well I'm sure we can sort that out. Drop me a line with anything specific and I'll do my best to help you out.
tmcd35 Posted July 16, 2014 Author Posted July 16, 2014 What size primary is this? 10 form intake?! Sorry, that's primary as in main, not as in type of school - lol. We're current'y 700 pupils and around 300 devices. We have plans to expand out wireless network in the coming year and look closer at the pupil:device ratio. We're a secondary school years 7-11. Currently sitting on around 25-30 virtual servers. Our existing file server is about 4-5 years old so it's now time to look at replacing it and looking at best current tech to do it with. Not sure if a full blown SAN is the way to go or what £7,500 is likely to buy us.
Bananas Posted July 16, 2014 Posted July 16, 2014 Last server that got installed here was a Dell with 2x E5-2690 Xeons 32GB RAM 5 x 200GB Intel enterprise SSDs Came to just under £5k 1
tmcd35 Posted July 16, 2014 Author Posted July 16, 2014 5 x 200GB Intel enterprise SSDs How much are these drives? 5x200Gb is 1Tb without redundancy, about 1/5th the actual total space I'd require as a minimum. Are SSD's still too expensive for mass storage? Anyone using SSD's with Storage Spaces?
ICTDirect_Dave Posted July 16, 2014 Posted July 16, 2014 Annoyingly I currently have 240GB Enterprise SSDs going for £65 each, but they're 3.5" drives which is frustrating!
VeryPC_Ed Posted July 16, 2014 Posted July 16, 2014 Hi tmcd35, We supply bespoke servers and could probably do something that would meet your needs, I'll drop you a PM as would need more info before being able to send specs etc. Thanks, Ed
Bananas Posted July 16, 2014 Posted July 16, 2014 How much are these drives? 5x200Gb is 1Tb without redundancy, about 1/5th the actual total space I'd require as a minimum. Are SSD's still too expensive for mass storage? Anyone using SSD's with Storage Spaces? Can't remember now but if you need more storage I'd do 2 SSDs mirrored for the OS and then either a pile of 15k SAS drives or a NAS or SAN to make the storage up. That dell server, once you get past all the various BIOS screens, 2012 boots in about 20 seconds! 1
Jasbo Posted July 16, 2014 Posted July 16, 2014 @tmcd35 " Are SSD's still too expensive for mass storage?" They are for me I was talking to a server supplier I have purchased from previously and they said they are supplying hybrid storage, so you have 8 drive bays in a server for storage and you fit two SSD and the rest 15k and you use the SSD as a giant cache. That's the theory, I have not looked into it anymore but plan to as I need to buy 2 servers soon and cannot afford all SSD but All sas storage seems a bit "rubbish" now we have SSD in desktops. 1
robjduk Posted July 16, 2014 Posted July 16, 2014 lol talk to Dell directly. I have every confidence they will pretty much destroy most comparable quotes as well as throw in a 5 year warranty.
tmcd35 Posted July 17, 2014 Author Posted July 17, 2014 (edited) Mmm, wonder if I miss-explained the purpose of this thread? Not really looking at quotes at the moment. Was hoping for some EduGeek expertise on the implementation side. Storage Spaces vs RAID, iSCSI vs SMBv3, sort of thing. My current thinking is to implement a JBOD with Storage Spaces. SSD looks too expensive, 900Gb 15k SAS drives look inviting. The question is how do I partition and advertise that space out, and how do I repurpose my existing server for redundancy? Also what kind of CPU/Ram would people recommend for a storage server/SAN controller (Windows 2012 based)? Also, if I go SSD for the OS, first is there any real point in doing that, and second is it really worth while going for two mirrored drives for the OS? Edited July 17, 2014 by tmcd35
localzuk Posted July 17, 2014 Posted July 17, 2014 I would suggest looking at tiered storage - you don't have to run the same disks for everything. We run things like our RDS server and SIMS VHDs from SSD (along with mandatory profile images). We then run the rest of our data from 10k rpm disks (both lower demand VHDs and our normal file storage). 15krpm disks are somewhat pointless - more spindles is better than faster spinning disks. Storage spaces are basically software RAID - when you set them up, you choose the schema you want to use, such as mirrored or parity. So, you effectively just set them up how you would RAID. With the speed of CPUs what they are now, the CPU part isn't so important any more. I'd go for a minimum of 8GB RAM but RAM is pretty darn cheap now, so 16GB would be a good base amount to go with. One thing to think about is the iSCSI vs SMB 3.0 storage question. iSCSI is pretty much a "standard" now, and Windows Server 2012/R2 have the capability to be used as an iSCSI target built in. However, its still more complex than simply running SMB 3.0 shares, but they are newer and less well known. The question of redundancy is a difficult one. If you're going down this sort of route, the only way of doing it is by using Storage Spaces and "Scale out file server". Basically, you have to have 2 servers with no disks in them (other than the OS), and then have dual homed SAS storage arrays connected to both servers. There aren't many of those arrays on the market yet either. These guys are the main supplier it seems! Server 2012 R2 Storage Spaces Some instructions for creating such a set up are available here: Deploy Clustered Storage Spaces The way we've done it, as we couldn't justify spending even more money on hardware was to have 1 storage server with everything on, used as primary. We then had a second identical server which had the file storage (ie. home directories and shared drives) set up to replicate to via DFSR. The VHDs are backed up nightly to the device via a normal backup solution (bearing in mind that we had to use "fixed disk" VHDX files, rather than dynamic). So, its somewhat redundant, but not perfect. In our case it was caused by my not being involved in the purchase of the original server so I had to make do with what was bought. 1
tmcd35 Posted July 17, 2014 Author Posted July 17, 2014 Thanks @localzuk, that's just the kind of discussion I'm looking for! Tiered storage is a worry, albeit a needless one (as in I'm probably making it needlessly complicated). I have to start thinking of how many of each kind of disk is required, their RAID, total capacity, which VHD's are stored in which tier, etc. Since we're talking about 10-16 spindles regardless, and 15k drives shouldn't be that expensive on the budget, I almost favour the JBOD method. Trow the disks at the server and sort it out later... Reading up on Storage Space and it appears 2012R2 has add in the ability to use SSD's as a write-back cache. Now, that is interesting. Reduce the number of SAS drives and introduce some SSD for cache. Question is how much SSD cache would be appropriate? 10% of the total array size? more/less? I think I'm favouring Storage Spaces over traditional RAID because of the flexibility it brings with growing volume sizes. It's the Windows answer to ZFS, and that sounds really useful in a VM environment. We currently use SMB v2 shares for everything. Moving to SMB v3 would be a simple upgrade for us, that said I wonder if introducing iSCSI and Cluster Shared Volumes would be more beneficial for our virtual hosts long term? Better fail over support? I was thinking of moving our core file data (home drives, public, etc), away from an SMB share on the file server and into a VHD headed up by a VM? I'm now wondering if that might introduce a bit of a bottleneck? A couple of DFS shares between old and new server might be a better solution for user data? In terms of the old server - I just don't want to get rid of it. Also our file server is the single point of failure at the moment. It think something along the lines of CSV and/or DFS is the answer to the redundancy problem. Anyone know if VHD's can be run from within a DFS share?
localzuk Posted July 17, 2014 Posted July 17, 2014 (edited) VHD/VHDXs won't run from inside a DFSR group (or at least, replication won't work). CSVs won't add any redundancy unless you use a third party tool to do that I don't think (such as DataKeeper by SIOS). The design is for multiple hyper-v nodes to connect to a single disk as far as I'm aware. You'd still end up needing to use something like Scale-Out-File-Server if you wanted to do natively in Windows. With regards to serving files - I don't think the bottleneck is such an issue, so long as you have plenty of network IO available. We've got 10GbE on our storage and hyper-V nodes, so we're miles away from bottlenecking. However, it really depends on your usage! We could currently get away with a pair of 1GbE connections per server to be honest! Regarding SSD cache - no idea! Never looked at this concept to be honest. Edited July 17, 2014 by localzuk
tmcd35 Posted July 17, 2014 Author Posted July 17, 2014 Mmmm, Might forget iSCSI then and stick with SMB. I could always set up a nightly Robocopy between servers for backup, AFAIR VSS allows live VHD's to be copied this way (I'm sure I've done it). Not the instant on solution at failover I'd like, but manually re-pointing a VM's VHD location and rebooting is quicker than rebuilding hardware and restoring from backup.
localzuk Posted July 17, 2014 Posted July 17, 2014 Mmmm, Might forget iSCSI then and stick with SMB. I could always set up a nightly Robocopy between servers for backup, AFAIR VSS allows live VHD's to be copied this way (I'm sure I've done it). Not the instant on solution at failover I'd like, but manually re-pointing a VM's VHD location and rebooting is quicker than rebuilding hardware and restoring from backup. Yeah, that will work - so long as you use fixed size VHDX files (and not the dynamically expanding ones). VSS only works with fixed VHDXs. Its basically what we do (we have a BackupAssist job set up to run nightly. We copy 1TB of VHDx files over every night.)
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