Recommend VMWare Esxi shared storage medium (again!)

[mikkydoos]

Hi all,

 

I'm revisiting a old problem that now really needs sorting.

 

 

I've got 2 x Esxi 6.5 essentials plus hosts, both with local storage and on a gigabit core.

Current hosts are HP rack 360 G9's... 2 x 4 core Xeons each with 72Gb Ram running about 5 VM's each both replicating to the other and backing up to NAS's with Veeam.

Both are 4 disk sata raid 10 arrays with esxi is installed on the array.... (why I did it like that I do not know instead of using removable storage... but hey!).

 

Host performance is 'average'. Migrating, backing up and restoring is slow mainly due to the disk access.

 

File storage is currently on a physical Windows box which I want to virtualise.

 

 

It is server upgrade time, so I could do with some recommendations of how to achieve:

 

a) shared storage

b) get the connectivity speed up between servers and backup NAS's.

 

 

Speccing the servers isn't an issue but am having trouble choosing what storage type, platform and connectivity to go for on my budget.

 

NFS, ICSI, VSAN, Storage Spaces, local storage with Starwinds?

Dedicated hardware, Windows/Linux, NAS?

 

SAN is well out of the question due to cost.

 

I also don't want to introduce a single point of failure as this is something that is not an issue at present.

 

 

Anticipated is up to 20K for the lot maybe including a couple of 10gb switches for the core.... Currently everything lives on a flat gigabit LAN.

 

Required is 8 -10 TB storage.

 

 

 

What we have right now works. Its reliable, resilient and plenty quick enough for end users.. but the design really needs updating.

 

 

What can you guys recommend to get the best value out of this?

 

 

 

Cheers in advance

[Julien]

Hello,

 

I am more or less in the same situation with similar hardware.

I currently use HP VSAN StoreVirtual which is EOL and I have yet to find a suitable replacement.

 

For the network I upgraded to 10G last year and used 2 x Dell S4112F-ON with a tandem tray which means you have 2 switch in 1 U and can benefit of redundancy as you have effectively two separate switches.

I use fs.com for the SFP+ (10G) /QSFP (40G) and used DAC and fibre depending on compatibility requirements. I used the HP/VMWare supported SFP+ network card or fabric. All came under 5K total budget.

[mavhc]

If you've only got 2 servers then just connect them directly to each other via some of their Gb or 10Gb NICs, then use local storage

[Sephiroth]

We recently upgraded our setup from VMWare ESXi 5.5 on 3 hosts with SAN to 2 hyperconverged hosts on Windows Server 2019 using S2D. Our setup is much bigger than you've described; each host had 2 x 16 core processors, 128GB RAM, 8Gb networking (8 x 1Gb separated into 4 networks - LAN 3Gb, SAN 3Gb, VMotion 1Gb, and backup 1Gb); SAN with 15TB storage capacity connected by iSCSI.

 

All that was replaced with 2 hosts direct connected at 10Gb to each other and LAN. With brand new hardware and consultancy, that cost us ~£35000. If you're willing to look at it yourself, then you could get a couple of second hand servers and do all that for a fraction of what we paid.