3 x servers +SAN to support them Vmware

[pablo007]

Hi all

I'm looking to get three new servers that will support the latest and greatest Vmware esxi products and a new SAN with around 30TB of storage that will host all of my VMs, at present i'm just looking at what folk are recommending at present and any ideas or views that could help steer me. If anyone has been through server/san refresh recently i would be keen to know circa costs

 

As always thanks in advance for any help/advice/views or just opinions

 

Uraken.

[PotNoodleTech]

Not a fan of SANS at all, but your looking at £25 - £50k depending on exactly what you get and how much is SSD storage.

[Norphy]

We've just gone through this for one of our schools. I'm not willing to put details up on a public forum but I will say that we went with Dell hardware, three vhosts and a Compellent SAN. I'll send you specifics in a PM.

 

I will say, however, that if we didn't already have this platform in our other schools we probably would have looked a lot closer at using HyperV with Storage Spaces Direct instead and spreading the VMs across local storage on the hosts. Something like the Stone Equinox platform.

Edited January 25, 2019 by Norphy

[jtotheb]

Hi all

I'm looking to get three new servers that will support the latest and greatest Vmware esxi products and a new SAN with around 30TB of storage that will host all of my VMs

 

Have you looked at VMware's vSAN if you're interested in the VMware route?

[pablo007]

@AButters if you don't use SANs can I ask where your VMS etc are stored or do you have physical boxes?

thanks for your input so far.

[pablo007]

Have you looked at VMware's vSAN if you're interested in the VMware route?

Yes briefly, as i understand vsan is the software that sits on the network and essential aggregates any local or DAS storage, a little like storage spaces, although i have zero exposure to vsan and i'm relatively new to vmware (but like it alot so far).

[pablo007]

We've just gone through this for one of our schools. I'm not willing to put details up on a public forum but I will say that we went with Dell hardware, three vhosts and a Compellent SAN. I'll send you specifics in a PM.

 

I will say, however, that if we didn't already have this platform in our other schools we probably would have looked a lot closer at using HyperV with Storage Spaces Direct instead and spreading the VMs across local storage on the hosts. Something like the Stone Equinox platform.

 

Thank you for the PM really helpful, the stone stuff always intrigued me, i courted the integrum for a while but the way things were could never get the big one off cost past finance (they would rather me buy a new server each year i think..)

[Achandler]

We aren't a school and are probably going through a similar process on a bigger scale with more powerful hosts and demands. We are most likely going down the VSAN route.

[PotNoodleTech]

I agree, VSAN is the ideal #1 solution, it is however hideously expensive to licence.

Hyper V with Storage Spaces is second and much better value.

Hyper V just Local storage with VMs mirroring onto other local storage (or host) is next, and also the cheapest and still provides some resilience.

SAN is last for me, overpriced, underperforming, hideous support costs, worse reliability in general than local storage, locked into a supplier for the duration of the usage.

[leegcvcc]

I really like the look of HP Simplivity. Expensive but less than vSAN and looks cracking!

[Achandler]

Welcome to the world of non education pricing, vSAN is pretty competitive! Edited January 25, 2019 by Achandler

[pablo007]

Welcome to the world of non education pricing, vSAN is pretty competitive!

 

Do you have any ballpark figures for education on VSAN?

[theeggmaster]

We've got the Stone Equinox platform with two nodes. It was installed in October 2018, and I've been really impressed with them so far. Another school I'm helping out in has HP Simplivity, and they seem good too.

[DrCheese]

How much would you be looking at for a HPE SimpliVity system? There's not much online. I've got to replace my SAN but wondering if it's better long term to change the SAN/Core servers at the same time. Finding prices all over the place for solutions tho, especially as Microsoft only properly support Storage Spaces direct on a few select solutions. (VMWare user currently but if I can save on licensing costs....)

[flyinghaggis]

How much would you be looking at for a HPE SimpliVity system? There's not much online. I've got to replace my SAN but wondering if it's better long term to change the SAN/Core servers at the same time. Finding prices all over the place for solutions tho, especially as Microsoft only properly support Storage Spaces direct on a few select solutions. (VMWare user currently but if I can save on licensing costs....)

 

We're in a similar boat and are looking to replace our, now 5 year old, HP blade server and SAN setup which is currently running Hyper-V. As others have said we're finding the Blade Server and SAN setup overly complex, expensive and difficult to manage for our needs. We've been steadily moving services into the cloud so are actually finding we require less onsite hardware than we did 5 years ago!

 

We'd considered just buying several standalone servers with local storage to run our virtualised environment but our re-sellers are trying to push us towards Hyper-Converged solutions and Simplivity is one that came up. We're also considering whether to move away from Hyper-V to VMWare as we've encountered problems with instability which appear to be linked to compatibility issues between Hyper-V and our SAN.

 

What's everyone's thoughts at the moment when it comes to replacing server room hardware? What do you reckon is the best performance/value compromise for schools?

 

Also, has anyone tried Simplivity?

Edited March 1, 2019 by flyinghaggis

[DrCheese]

To be honest, we're still researching this - We can get a SAN for around £17k and carry on using our existing hosts, but they'll need replacing eventually so the total cost of ownership over time is higher.

 

We've looked at getting two hosts and filling them up with disks in a non hyperconverged setup, but I can't find a way to do this cheaply with SSD/flash storage from a vendor like Dell or HP, so would probably be forced to use standard disks which have low iOPS, or look at storage spaces standalone tiering, which doesn't seem to be too wildly deployed

You can't use non Dell/HP certified drives in their servers even if you use the same model numbers as they put their own firmware on the devices, which is annoying as hell as the markup they charge on top is insane (I found one SSD dell want £2k for for just £500 elsewhere) - There's a few guys on here that use NAS's full of SSDs to get around this but I don't know how comfortable I feel about this based on what I've read about the reliability and support of these devices over a proper SAN/DAS setup. (There's some horror stories on reddit/r/sysadmin/

 

Also have the downside that you can't easily migrate VMs across them unless you have a replica model (Then you need enough storage on each host to hold the lot) & it doesn't automatically fallover so if you're on a beach somewhere and services fail you'd need to remote on to kick it over.

 

Everything I've read about storage spaces in a hyper-converged setup tells you not to do a 2 node model, even tho it's possible as it's not considered especially reliable & definitely don't try to do it without buying properly certified hardware - So looked at a third party solution like Starwinds that might be doable instead. But then you've got extra layers of complexity/things that could go wrong so you'd still to have a DR plan if that failed.

 

Eventually we'll have to make a choice, I'm just loathe to blow loads of money on backend stuff when as you say, we're all reducing our usage of on site servers & what we do have left will probably go up to the cloud eventually anyway (Printing/SIMS/File hosting/Intranet Servers etc)

 

 

Edit: - Funnily enough we're looking to go the other way with VMware > Hyper-v - We've hit tons of obsecure VMware bugs recently that cause major issues midday and it's driving us nuts!

Edited March 1, 2019 by DrCheese

[PotNoodleTech]

There is a strong case for keeping it simple, and I firmly believe it is the way to go in schools with ever decreasing budgets and ever increasing requirements. If I refreshed my server infrastructure today I would probably go with three hosts, in a Hyper V cluster, with local storage all SSD and make sure we have enough storage capacity to run all VMs on two hosts, and all essential VMS on one host should the worst happen.

 

I use Intel SSDs on my hosts and they are supported by Dell, no RAID alarms or anything untoward, you don't have to buy dell only drives they will support you rolling your own SSD drives as long as they are on the compatibility list (many intel models). It doesn't have to cost the earth I paid £240 per drive and performance is outstanding.

 

I've gone the opposite way to almost everyone else over the last 5+ years, no SANs, no Hyper converged, no VSAN, nothing fancy. No hidden costs, no hideously expensive support agreements, avoiding single point of failure (e.g. SAN, Dell VRTX, etc).

 

Just use commodity boxes shoved with SSDS and you too can have 99.9%+ uptime for peanuts!

[supportman]

My preference is local storage, Sans are designed for high density data centres really. Not small organisations like schools.

[flyinghaggis]

There is a strong case for keeping it simple, and I firmly believe it is the way to go in schools with ever decreasing budgets and ever increasing requirements. If I refreshed my server infrastructure today I would probably go with three hosts, in a Hyper V cluster, with local storage all SSD and make sure we have enough storage capacity to run all VMs on two hosts, and all essential VMS on one host should the worst happen.

 

I agree with you regarding keeping things simple. Other than Simplivity (which is what HP are trying to sell us on) our lower cost plan B was to do exactly what you've suggested (several standalone servers clustered together with speedy local storage)! Part of me wonders whether it might make more sense just to save the money and go with the more straightforward option?

 

As things gradually move cloud based systems our requirements for onsite storage/processing seem to be diminishing each year

[DrCheese]

I use Intel SSDs on my hosts and they are supported by Dell, no RAID alarms or anything untoward, you don't have to buy dell only drives they will support you rolling your own SSD drives as long as they are on the compatibility list (many intel models). It doesn't have to cost the earth I paid £240 per drive and performance is outstanding.

 

Which model are you using? I've read online that the 730's flash orange and don't report failures/wear limits up -

and that the 14th gen servers go nuts with their fans if you do the same.

[supportman]

We use samsung SSDs in all our Dell 320 and 330s. No issues here.

[DrCheese]

No warnings in the iDrac or orange lights on the front bays?

[supportman]

No warnings in the iDrac or orange lights on the front bays?

 

Nope, works perfectly. All our Dells have 3rd party SSDs and not had a single issue.

[pablo007]

Is your local storage shared or is there no requirement for fault tolerance? what you suggest would definitely be my prefered method though I worry about a server falling over with the all the locally attached storage with it and the vms not being able to migrate across.

[pablo007]

@ abutters Is your local storage shared or is there no requirement for fault tolerance? what you suggest would definitely be my prefered method though I worry about a server falling over with the all the locally attached storage with it and the vms not being able to migrate across.

 

edit: forget that I just noticed that you said you would use HyperV so probably would use storage spaces as coalesce all the storage