Replacing old HP server hardware

[MrWu]

Hi all

 

I will be looking for a clean slate rebuild of my whole network and server infrastructure

 

Currently I have old but still robust HP G6 servers:

 

2 x DL360 as DCs

4 x DL380 as HyperV, connected to HP MSA SAS SAN (around 25VMs)

1 x DL 360 As DPM backup + Old SAN

2 x DL380 as fileservers (7TB worth of Student / staff data)

 

With Azure etc, are you folks reducing the amount of server hardware onsite? Could I in theory budget say £50k ball park to replace the above?

Edited February 6, 2019 by MrWu

[PotNoodleTech]

Way too many servers. I'm down to three physical servers - 2 x Hyper V and 1 x Veeam Backup server and it's faster than it's ever been.

 

Sans are an archaic thing of the past IMHO, physical DCs are a thing of the past IMHO. What are your usage stats on the VM hosts because a 6.25 vm per physical host average is poor - I'd be looking for more like 15-20 VMs per host to get value for money out of the hardware.

 

Also - I only buy refurbished kit now - some multinational company can lose 40k in 2 years on the hardware and I'll pick it up for peanuts and run it for another 5 years.

 

You could replace all that with 2 x Dell R730s packed with SSDs and 1 R720 with 3.5" 4TB + drives for about £15k if you went the refurbished route.

Edited February 6, 2019 by PotNoodleTech

[DrBeaker]

Way too many servers. I'm down to three physical servers - 2 x Hyper V and 1 x Veeam Backup server and it's faster than it's ever been.

 

Sans are an archaic thing of the past IMHO, physical DCs are a thing of the past IMHO. What are your usage stats on the VM hosts because a 6.25 vm per physical host average is poor - I'd be looking for more like 15-20 VMs per host to get value for money out of the hardware.

 

Also - I only buy refurbished kit now - some multinational company can lose 40k in 2 years on the hardware and I'll pick it up for peanuts and run it for another 5 years.

 

You could replace all that with 2 x Dell R730s packed with SSDs and 1 R720 with 3.5" 4TB + drives for about £15k if you went the refurbished route.

 

 

How many guest VMs have you got though on those hosts? How about your resiliency and load balancing? I'm more of an ESX/ESXi person to be honest - how you do deal with the equivalent of vMotion on your Hyper-V hosts? I do keep hearing how SANs are a thing of the past now and some have gone for a mixture of a file-server and cloud storage instead of the cost and issues with SANs.

[MrWu]

Way too many servers. I'm down to three physical servers - 2 x Hyper V and 1 x Veeam Backup server and it's faster than it's ever been.

 

Sans are an archaic thing of the past IMHO, physical DCs are a thing of the past IMHO. What are your usage stats on the VM hosts because a 6.25 vm per physical host average is poor - I'd be looking for more like 15-20 VMs per host to get value for money out of the hardware.

 

Also - I only buy refurbished kit now - some multinational company can lose 40k in 2 years on the hardware and I'll pick it up for peanuts and run it for another 5 years.

 

You could replace all that with 2 x Dell R730s packed with SSDs and 1 R720 with 3.5" 4TB + drives for about £15k if you went the refurbished route.

 

That sounds like music to my ears!

 

So you can pretty much consolidate DC / Fileserver and Virtualise this

 

I am also interested in Veeam Backup vs DPM .. worth switching over?

[PlantHead]

2 Hyper- or Vmware host servers with enough RAM to be able to run all servers on 1 host for failover

I would probably go for a physical SAN infrastructure but do your reading on VSAN's before you decide.

I would virtualise 1 DC (HyperV or VMWare) and still keep a physical on an old box that I wouldn't worry about backing up. There isn't much point in having 2 virtual DC's if they both use the same shared hardware and you want to make sure you always have access to a DC if the virtual hosts go down.

Virtualise the File Servers and maybe even cluster them across both virtual hosts - depends on how much downtime you can take.

If you are mainly windows servers I would look at backing everything up to Azure to cover off-site backups - I would stage the backup to an onsite server first but probably not to my virtual environment because of performance.