Server room hardware refresh

[mrbios]

Unsure what to do about replacing my aging SAN.

 

It's over 5 years old, could make it last another couple of years on third party support but budgets are only expected to get worse and there's a surprise pot of cash available now to get this done so I'm seizing upon the opportunity...

 

Current setup is a pretty standard 3 vmware hosts, 10gb iscsi, SAN with dual controllers etc. All of it was purchased in 2015. (Hosts are E5-2620v3 cpus x 2, 192GB ram. SAN is a Nimble CS215, storage needed is in the region of 18TB)

 

So far these are the options i've got:

Microsoft S2D (I'm worried about moving to Hyper-V as a VMware guy, and various people have now warned me about S2D being "fragile" which is a scary thought given how sold VMware is)

Starwind vSAN (Haven't done enough research into this one yet to see how good it is)

VMware vSAN (Expensive)

Dell VRTX box with 2 nodes (Someone on reddit said not to bother with this as VRTX is likely going EOL soon)

Like for like replacement (old fashioned now with converged and hyper converged generally being cheaper for the right solution)

Nutanix (Vendor told me this is likely over my budget and built more for scalability, whereas I'm move...scaling down than up)

 

Any other options or comments on the options I've mentioned above? Whatever i put in place needs to stay solid for the next 5 years, during that time i expect to become more cloud dependant, though certainly not entirely, and not any time soon.

Edited January 14, 2021 by mrbios

[FN-GM]

I have moved 3 Vmware platforms to S2D with Hyper-V. It's been nothing but good. Many vendors (such as Dell) will provide technical support for both hardware and software if you buy a S2D product.

 

I would avoid Nutanix at all costs. I took it out of service here. It was unreliable, awful slow interface and used a lot of resources just to run it.

[mrbios]

I have moved 3 Vmware platforms to S2D with Hyper-V. It's been nothing but good. Many vendors (such as Dell) will provide technical support for both hardware and software if you buy a S2D product.

 

I would avoid Nutanix at all costs. I took it out of service here. It was unreliable, awful slow interface and used a lot of resources just to run it.

 

It's interesting, everyone around Edugeek i speak to has nothing but good things to say about S2D, then any vendors or people working in businesses say the opposite. I wonder why the experiences have been so different?

 

It's certainly the solution i was most leaning towards, as it's also the cheapest solution in the list. Is it worth getting certified S2D node hardware from the likes of Dell, Lenovo etc, rather than self specing something from the likes of broadberry? (guessing i'd pay a premium for such, but may have a better time of it)

[FN-GM]

It's interesting, everyone around Edugeek i speak to has nothing but good things to say about S2D, then any vendors or people working in businesses say the opposite. I wonder why the experiences have been so different?

 

I find this happens with other "Budget" systems such as the Unifi products. I think its due to people being spoilt with premium products - business usually have more money. Its true that Hyper-V clusters don't have features such as templates (you can get around this by making a image and saving the VHDX file) but it runs great.

 

It's certainly the solution i was most leaning towards, as it's also the cheapest solution in the list. Is it worth getting certified S2D node hardware from the likes of Dell, Lenovo etc, rather than self specing something from the likes of broadberry? (guessing i'd pay a premium for such, but may have a better time of it)

 

I found the pricing with Dell similar. At the time HP didn't offer it all - they were still pushing people towards a SAN. That might have changed in the last 12 months.