pauldredge Posted August 11, 2015 Posted August 11, 2015 Just wondering what peoples opinions would be for setting up of 5 servers with a SAN. The servers have minimal space which is why there is a SAN. VMWare is out of the question due to costs as is Citrix. I was planning hyper v with some sort of failover clustering. But what would all you other techies do in this situation?
Ephelyon Posted August 11, 2015 Posted August 11, 2015 What's the spec of the servers, and what's the storage on the SAN?
pauldredge Posted August 11, 2015 Author Posted August 11, 2015 Servers are decent spec'd Dell 610s with 36GB RAM and 2x 146GB HD which is in Raid 1. The SAN is a Dell md3200i and after being in a Raid 5 it has nearly 5TB of space.
pauldredge Posted August 11, 2015 Author Posted August 11, 2015 Off the top of my head I would say they are 2x quad cores. They are very well spec servers and also have 4 network connections on them.
Ephelyon Posted August 11, 2015 Posted August 11, 2015 Well, you could look at setting up a student lab there, using either ESXi Free or Hyper-V Server 2012 R2. How does it compare to your Production setup?
pauldredge Posted August 11, 2015 Author Posted August 11, 2015 Did think ESXi free but then would have to pay for the vsphere but then limited with the one host unless the school paid. Was going to use hyper v with all the servers running 2012r2 which I have been doing today but with running failover clustering I havent got it doing what I wanted it to do. Currently everything is blank as its a new school thats been taken on.
powdarrmonkey Posted August 12, 2015 Posted August 12, 2015 Start by establishing requirements, not dreaming up solutions.
synaesthesia Posted August 12, 2015 Posted August 12, 2015 ESXi would still be functional enough with it and vsphere in it's free state, certainly more than most schools would require. You can have as many hosts as you like, there's no limit there. Failing that HyperV would definitely be a good shout; it's still not up there with VMWare just yet but if you go that route with the view of upgrading to the new Server WhateverTheyCallItNext then it'll be a good choice.
FN-GM Posted August 12, 2015 Posted August 12, 2015 To be honest, they are getting old. If there is no warranty them they will not go into production. I would just sell the lot on eBay or something.
GeekyPete Posted August 12, 2015 Posted August 12, 2015 I take it these have been refreshed. I'm in a similar position with some older servers with much lower spec. I'd set three up with VM Ware free, keep the other two in lieu of any warranties and then use them for non essential systems. I'd put my Spiceworks server on them and set up a test domain where I'd prove things work before introducing them to the production network. I'd also set setup some VM ware workstations on the production network, again for testing/Dev.
john Posted August 12, 2015 Posted August 12, 2015 Just wondering what peoples opinions would be for setting up of 5 servers with a SAN. The servers have minimal space which is why there is a SAN. VMWare is out of the question due to costs as is Citrix. I was planning hyper v with some sort of failover clustering. But what would all you other techies do in this situation? Why is Citrix out of the question it is free so just wondered why you have ruled it out?
danbuntu Posted August 12, 2015 Posted August 12, 2015 You could use proxmox as a hypervisor as that is free and gives you pretty much all the benefits of vmware. And then use the cluster for student labs as people have suggested.
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