To go converged or hyper converged?

[mark100]

I work at a small college and we are looking to replace our traditional server/switch/san infrastructure as its hitting its 8th birthday and starting to show its age. Everything is on VMware, but can't upgrade to 6.7 due to the age of the host servers.

 

I've spoken to resellers and vendors and shortlisted down proposals, but have got to a point where I don't know whether should look at converged or go hyper converged. All are hybrid SAN/HHD solutions, same amount of RAM/Processors, proactive support packages.

 

Has anyone got experience/reviews of the following kit, or have moved from one to another for any reasons?

 

Dell FX2 3 nodes FC640, SCv3020 SAN

 

HPE DL360 3 nodes, HPE MSA 2052

 

Starwind XL-H-11.8 2 Node

 

Nutanix NX-1365-G6-4108-CM

 

 

 

Appreciate any advice, Thanks

[LTurner3692]

I would like to see what others say, ive been looking at this for a while.

[Norphy]

Dell FX2 3 nodes FC640, SCv3020 SAN

 

Can't speak for any of the Hyper Converged solutions but we have something similar to this, a three node cluster with Dell PowerEdge R630 servers and a Compellent SCv3020 hybrid SAN with tiered storage. I'm very happy with the setup, we have three farms using this hardware and will be adding a fourth in the summer.

 

That said, if I were doing this from scratch, I'd look harder at the hyper converged systems. The reason we didn't was because for two of our schools, there was an urgent need to replace the virtual hosts but no money for the storage. The storage got replaced a year later for those two schools. When the cluster at the third school was up for replacement, we decided to put a near enough identical one in to simplify support.

[dazza007]

Looking at the same myself, I would go for Hyperconverged I am looking at the WSSD only as the technology is in its infancy in comparison to a traditional builds and want the support. Implementing RDMA using RoCE is a little more costly to implement as Mellanox cards seem to be the go to cards to use, iWARP is recommended for small to medium scale solutions which is how to bring down the initial build costs.

[VeryPC_Ed]

Hey Mark,

 

We've been a Starwind partner for about 10 years and Starwind VSAN works quite well and is stupidly simple to manage (which is nice).

 

We've seen an increase in people looking at S2D but as dazza007 says, costs vary depending on what cards and kit you use - I'd recommend sticking to a vendor validated solution (like Dell Readynode etc.) to ensure you are covered for support if any issues.

 

We just recently did an SCv3020 (SAS) install for a school and it's a great bit of kit, very simple to setup and was surprisingly fast.

 

If you have any questions, drop me a PM.