Little help with best configuration for Hyper-V iSCSI

[SparkySX]

Hey all.

I’m new to the forum and have been lurking and reading as much information as I can recently and its been really helpful.

I would like to see what other people’s recommendations are for the best configuration of the equipment I’ve got.

General details:

I have created LAGs on the switches in the two cabinets giving 4 x 1GB links between the switches in the same cabinet and 6 x 1GB links between the two cabinets.

The server spec:

HP ProLiant ML310e Gen8

Xeon E3-1120-V3 3.10GHz

32GB PC3-12800E RAM

4 x 120GB 850 EVO SSDs (2 in Raid 1 running Server 2012 Datacentre hypervisor)

2 x Port built in 330i Gigabit ports

1 x 4 port PCI-e HP 331t Gigabit card

Storage:

Synology Disktation DS1815+ 24TB Red Pro (8 x 3TB)

Im undecided on 1 12TB RAID-10 or 2 6TB RAID-10s

I plan to run VMs as follows:

1 - DHCP, DNS, Active Directory

2 - File and print services

3 - WDS, WSUS and MDT/SCCM

4 - SIMS and FMS

5 - SQL Based student test system

Im really not sure how’s best to configure the networking side of things. NIC teaming for 4 NICs shared to all VMs? Do some sort of separation for Outbidding and iSCSI?

Any help would be much appreciated

Cheers

Phil

[LytchettNM]

I few things here, keep Storage traffic on its own network and interface if you can.

You said you created LAG's have you used LACP?

Had a quick check into the CPU and it looks like it's 4 cores?

Don't raid the SSD's on the host server mirror them it will only be running the host OS.

Storage drives, raid 5 or maybe 6 would be my recommendation.

How many computers on the system. What IP range subnet are you using?

Edited September 28, 2015 by Techforyou

[SparkySX]

I few things here, keep Storage traffic on its own network and interface if you can.

You said you created LAG's have you used LACP?

Had a quick check into the CPU and it looks like it's 4 cores?

Don't raid the SSD's on the host server mirror them it will only be running the host OS.

Storage drives, raid 5 or maybe 6 would be my recommendation.

How many computers on the system. What IP range subnet are you using?

 

Okay I'll use a separate switch for the iSCSI traffic. I hadn't factored that in but i will now.

Yes, used LACP on the Netgear switches.

The SSDs are Raid 1 so just striped as you suggest.

Yeah unfortunately replacing the server/CPU is out of budget for this year.

I chose RAID-10 for the performance enhancement as we won't need the full 24TB of storage, 12TB is loads.

Up to 100 machines on a 10.42.*.* range

[LytchettNM]

You don't have to use a whole switch if you can use vlan or directly connect the server to the storage.

In regards to you VM's you will have to assign vCPU's and ram to each VM as well as leave something for the Host, if you cut back to much the Performance of the system will just not be there.

We run a min of 1 CPU & 4 Gb of ram per VM but some will require more resource like the SQL server you suggest maybe 2 vCPU's for that so a 4 core server will just not cut it as a host I'm sorry to say.

If you are able to run the services you have listed on the one server already then I would stick with it until budget allows for more hardware.

Regards

Darren

[3s-gtech]

That CPU (or actually the E3-1220-V3) is 4 core, 4 thread. It'll probably be fine for running five VMs, but not with the workloads you're looking at I expect. SCCM and SQL/SIMS being on there would raise alarm bells as to how capable it'll be. That also depends on your school size - if you're a decent sized secondary, a SIMS server alone can sometimes need most of that spec to work optimally. You may also find that you don't have quite enough RAM headroom for what you need, again considering SCCM and SIMS.

 

It's a decent enough base for virtualisation, but I would stick to lower demand services on it (as we did with a similar spec server a few years back). That is, running services like DCs, WSUS, DHCP, DNS, KMS, NPS, Certificate Authority, lower demand file servers, etc.

[SparkySX]

Thought I'd update this with the changes that are happening and see what people recommend following the hardware change.

 

I've managed to get the budget to allow for a new server. This server being a:

HP ProLiant ML350 Gen9

Xeon E5-2620v3 (6 Core 2.4GHz boost to 302GHz - 12 threads)

64GB DDR4-2133 CAS-15-15-15 Registered RAM

4 x HP 900GB 6G SAS 10K rpm

4 On-board Gigabit LAN + 4 Port PCI-e card

 

After having a think more about the VMs, i may need to a extras and end up with:

 

I plan to run VMs as follows:

1 - DHCP, DNS, Active Directory

2 - File and print services

3 - WDS, WSUS and MDT

4 - SIMS and FMS

5 - SQL Based student test system

6 - McAfee Viruscan EPO

 

With the advice received above, i think this is roughly what I’ll do:

 

2 ports on board and 2 ports on card set as iSCSI traffic on a separate switch with the 4 ports from the Synology going to the same switch

2 ports on board and 1 port on card setup in a team for out-going traffic

1 port on card for management

 

The first 3 VMs will be set with 2048 base RAM with dynamic memory enabled.

Sims VM will be set with 16GB static (As per MS recommendations re: dynamic memory)

Same for the test system but this is only used once a term so can be shutdown while not in use.

 

Can anyone see any major floors/ recommendations for improvement?

 

Cheers all!

[LytchettNM]

Hi Phil

Great news, I'm assuming you still have the ML310?

If you are going to use Windows 2012 r2 then I would have the ML310 as a physical DC and a second DC hosted as a VM on ML350

DHCP and DNS on both DC's to split the load.

Personally I would not use dynamic ram!

I allow 4gb and 1 vCore for each of our VM's then add more if required.

I agree with the 16GB for SIMS make sure you limit the max ram to about 12/14gb useable within SQL or SIMS will just grind to a halt and 4 core's for this one.

Networking you have 8 ports to play with I the ML350 and as I don't know the storage box I'm assuming 4 port on that.

2 ports from the on-broad and 2 ports from the extra card into a lag for storage and connect directly to the NAS using say a 192.168.100.x/24 or less for network don't forget to check out jumbo frames to improve performance.

Then on the client side of things use something like 10.42.x.x/24 network.

 

For the servers I think I would use a pair of SSD's mirrored for the host's.

Should be a nice little system.

 

We run 6 servers, 1 hosting DC and network monitoring then the remaining 5 are arranged as 2 clusters in 2 server rooms to back each other up, each of the hosts has 2 X CPU's latest v3 Intel chip, 10 cores / 20 threads per CPU and 128GB per host. 1450 students and around 200 staff so just a little bigger.

[IanT]

Thought I'd update this with the changes that are happening and see what people recommend following the hardware change.

 

I've managed to get the budget to allow for a new server. This server being a:

HP ProLiant ML350 Gen9

Xeon E5-2620v3 (6 Core 2.4GHz boost to 302GHz - 12 threads)

64GB DDR4-2133 CAS-15-15-15 Registered RAM

4 x HP 900GB 6G SAS 10K rpm

4 On-board Gigabit LAN + 4 Port PCI-e card

 

After having a think more about the VMs, i may need to a extras and end up with:

 

I plan to run VMs as follows:

1 - DHCP, DNS, Active Directory

2 - File and print services

3 - WDS, WSUS and MDT

4 - SIMS and FMS

5 - SQL Based student test system

6 - McAfee Viruscan EPO

 

With the advice received above, i think this is roughly what I’ll do:

 

2 ports on board and 2 ports on card set as iSCSI traffic on a separate switch with the 4 ports from the Synology going to the same switch

2 ports on board and 1 port on card setup in a team for out-going traffic

1 port on card for management

 

The first 3 VMs will be set with 2048 base RAM with dynamic memory enabled.

Sims VM will be set with 16GB static (As per MS recommendations re: dynamic memory)

Same for the test system but this is only used once a term so can be shutdown while not in use.

 

Can anyone see any major floors/ recommendations for improvement?

 

Cheers all!

 

Just some thoughts on this, couple of points:

 

I would have the NICs setup as follows:

2x NICs for Hyper-V Management (In a team)

2x (or even 4 NICs) NICs as a TRUNK port where all Hyper-V traffic goes (In a team)

1x for iSCSI-A Traffic (MPIO)

1x for iSCSI-B Traffic (MPIO)

 

Have you purchased a ILO Advanced License?

 

I would up the memroy, 64Gb for a Hyper-V host is quite low imo

 

Why are you going with 4x 900Gb disks if you have the iSCSI SAN?

 

Just stick 2x small SSD disks in there ina RAID1 or 2x 146Gb SAS 15K disks

 

Have you thought about how you going to to slice and dice your SAN up, what disk configs are you going to use?

[SparkySX]

Just some thoughts on this, couple of points:

 

I would have the NICs setup as follows:

2x NICs for Hyper-V Management (In a team)

2x (or even 4 NICs) NICs as a TRUNK port where all Hyper-V traffic goes (In a team)

1x for iSCSI-A Traffic (MPIO)

1x for iSCSI-B Traffic (MPIO)

 

Have you purchased a ILO Advanced License?

 

I would up the memroy, 64Gb for a Hyper-V host is quite low imo

 

Why are you going with 4x 900Gb disks if you have the iSCSI SAN?

 

Just stick 2x small SSD disks in there ina RAID1 or 2x 146Gb SAS 15K disks

 

Have you thought about how you going to to slice and dice your SAN up, what disk configs are you going to use?

 

Unfortunately 64GB is at the limit of the budget ill be able to get and for the load it will get, i cant see if causing any issues.

 

Im running a few virtualised environments, all be it with a little less load, at 40GB and haven't hit any problems with those.

 

The 900GB drives are part of a pre-configured deal that's available to me and works out the same price as it would with it spec'd up without them

 

I missed that it comes with 2 80GB SSDs and I've got 4 120GB SSDs which could be used too.

 

No, the slicing and dicing definitely one bit I'm not sure how to do to create the most efficient system with a good fall back. (the host will be backed up to the second server with SCCM - DPM)

 

P.S. Thanks for the help so far everyone!

Edited October 8, 2015 by SparkySX

[3s-gtech]

Don't stress on the RAM, i can usually be bumped up later depending on the configuration and whether registered memory is used. We have plenty spare on our hosts, specced to 64GB or 72GB and they're well populated.

[SparkySX]

Don't stress on the RAM, i can usually be bumped up later depending on the configuration and whether registered memory is used. We have plenty spare on our hosts, specced to 64GB or 72GB and they're well populated.

 

As i said I'm not worried about it causing any issues . The server supports around 128GB and for the size school it is, they'll never utilise that full amount.