dezt Posted June 16, 2009 Posted June 16, 2009 (edited) We are looking at virtualising 6 or 7 servers here, I priced up a SAN setup but was told it was too expensive, so i'm going down the route of purchasing a good spec server with lots of local storage for VM's. The problem i'm facing is what software to use for hosting the VM's. I was contemplating Server 2008 Hyper-V, but someone mentioned VMWare ESXi to me. The only experience I have with Virtual machines at the moment is through the free version of Virtual server microsoft offered and we run 1 VM through it. The server i'm looking at is a HP ML370 G5, with 2 2.83 quad core CPUs, 10Gb Ram, 2x72Gb Hdds mirrored for OS, 5x300Gb Hdd's raid 5 for storage, 6x1000mb Nics, hot swap redundant PSU. Will this run ESXi? Should i go for the 1 server at that spec, or should i knock the spec down a bit and get 2 servers one for redundancy, just in case? Sor far everything i'm looking at has a redundant option, the OS hard drives would be mirrored on a raid card, the storage hard drives would be in a raid 5 array, the PSU is redundant as well. Any advice would be great as I don't want to go ahead and buy this server and then in a year realise that i messed up in the planning process. Thanks Oh, the servers being virtualised will be print server, Files server, WSUS, things like that, i'm not virtualising the exchange or my DC at the moment. All other servers are not resource hungry. Edited June 16, 2009 by dezt
WStore_Dan Posted June 16, 2009 Posted June 16, 2009 Hi dezt If you PM me your number, I'll get our server, storage and virtualisation specialist to give you a call if thats ok? He's very higly qualified and will be able to tell you exactly what you need and whats best to go for. Alternatively you can email me or call me on 01252 745130
Kamran7860 Posted June 16, 2009 Posted June 16, 2009 Hi For a SAN have a look at QNAP iSCSI Business NAS. I would suggest the QNAP TS-509 Pro or QNAP TS-809U if have a larger budget. What i would say is, if your going for ESXi make sure the hardware is ESXi compatible. I am also doing a similer project this summer and Ive opted for 2x Sun Fire X2200 M2 (2x Quad-Core AMD Opteron 2376 2.3 GHz and 8 GB) as they have 4 NICs each which will come in handy. I will be using a QNAP TS-509 Pro using 4 1TB hard drives in RAID 5 for the iSCSi storage. I will be using VMware ESXi as i am more familier and have had better luck with the Converter. Hope this helps. 1
Duke Posted June 16, 2009 Posted June 16, 2009 Any idea how much budget you have? I've been testing Hyper-V, Xen and ESX for the past couple of months and I'm currently leaning strongly towards ESX. If you can get a SAN and two servers then that'll give you brilliant failover and redundancy compared to just having one server. Check out my thread HERE comparing the three virtualisation products, it might give you an idea of what other people are using and why. Cheers, Chris 1
Guest monkeyx Posted June 16, 2009 Posted June 16, 2009 We looked at xen, vmware and hyperv. We ended up going with an open source tool called Proxmox VE Which acts as a front end to openVZ and KVM. Still get full vzctl access from cli if needed though. We have got this running several live servers (Windows 2003/2008 and Ubuntu server 8.04) and even have a contigency server to do migrations etc. More than happy to offer advice if any required.
dezt Posted June 16, 2009 Author Posted June 16, 2009 My budget was drastically cut, I have a maximum of £8000 for this, which is why i was thinking of not using a san, unless there's a way i can get everything i need for less than 8k
nicholab Posted June 16, 2009 Posted June 16, 2009 I don't know why you not looked at the sun stoarge 7110 lot of people have deployed them here.
Duke Posted June 16, 2009 Posted June 16, 2009 I don't know why you not looked at the sun stoarge 7110 lot of people have deployed them here. I can't remember offhand how much the 7110's start at but I can definitely recommend the Sun S7000 series of storage too. Have a look then give Andy at Cutter Project a shout. Chris
Guest monkeyx Posted June 16, 2009 Posted June 16, 2009 My budget was drastically cut, I have a maximum of £8000 for this, which is why i was thinking of not using a san, unless there's a way i can get everything i need for less than 8k We decided to spend the money on two servers in that we can easily replicate and migrate machines between them. We managed to do this in under £8k and we bought 1 very good server with loads of RAM etc, the other server is a DR but can run 100% of what is on the first server if required. Just a little more slowly But we can use almost any modern hardware with Proxmox In terms of SAN Openfiler is fully featured SAN/NAS device. But you would need to spend most your budget on the SAN still. We are hoping to get a SAN next year, we saw more benefit from the virtualisation project. But each school may differ on this.
dezt Posted June 16, 2009 Author Posted June 16, 2009 I just took a look at Suns website for the 7110, they start at £8,600, which is over the entire cost i've got to play with unfortunatly. I did have a project priced up but it came to £22,000 which my SBM said was too much, I was then asked to see what i can do with £8,000
Guest coquet636 Posted June 16, 2009 Posted June 16, 2009 I just took a look at Suns website for the 7110, they start at £8,600, which is over the entire cost i've got to play with unfortunatly. I did have a project priced up but it came to £22,000 which my SBM said was too much, I was then asked to see what i can do with £8,000 After originally quoting £22,000 i am sure they would find the extra £600 to get the server you want after telling them how hard you tried to come in on a budget nearly a third of what you wanted........
Guest monkeyx Posted June 16, 2009 Posted June 16, 2009 After originally quoting £22,000 i am sure they would find the extra £600 to get the server you want after telling them how hard you tried to come in on a budget nearly a third of what you wanted........ One problem you would have is a SAN as a single point of failure and no money left for virtualisation though?
dezt Posted June 16, 2009 Author Posted June 16, 2009 After originally quoting £22,000 i am sure they would find the extra £600 to get the server you want after telling them how hard you tried to come in on a budget nearly a third of what you wanted........ But that just gets me the storage, i then need to find a server to host my Virtual platform on, don't I?
dezt Posted June 16, 2009 Author Posted June 16, 2009 @MonkeyX How hard is Proxmox VE to use / get to know from having no experience with it?
Theblacksheep Posted June 16, 2009 Posted June 16, 2009 Forget a SAN if you budget is 8k... thats the cost of entry level ISCSI SANS. How about dropping the 5x300Gb Hdds on the server and stick some drives in an NAS box for storing VMs on. As long as these are on a seperate network (or vlan) you'll get some ok performance (20-80mb per sec), but fine for running low-intensity servers (not file, exch, etc).. Maybe something like the SS4200E or as Kamran suggested the qnap ts-109, I have no idea if these work with ESXi but you get the idea...
Guest monkeyx Posted June 16, 2009 Posted June 16, 2009 @MonkeyX How hard is Proxmox VE to use / get to know from having no experience with it? It is as easy the commercial offerings. The clustering is much easier than the commercial offerings. See video tutorials for moreinfo. The technicians at our school chose proxmox over over offerings and they are windows users rather linux users (Me being the odd one out!) Proxmox add a nice front end to openVZ/KVM/Qemu which takes longer from cli if you are not used to dealing with them. opnVZ and KVM are large open source projects so there is good support. The only sticking point for us was getting the server to see all the storage and I should probably document and share this. In relation to storage our main server has about 4TB of usable storage (SAS drives with upgraded raid controller) that is shared amongst several machines. Thats suits our purpose and loadings. We then backup these machines to our backup server. Your schools data loadings could be pushing you more towards a SAN? We will add an openfiler next year and use iscsi to share the IO and then add more machines to the current main vritualisation server as it is bound by IO now rather than RAM and CPU. Promox is totally free to try and no need for upgrades to get full features etc. If you are interested in server specs we used etc let me know and I will PM you details. (Standard Dell server for main server and home made for our DR server ) Tim (aka monkeyx)
clodhopper Posted June 16, 2009 Posted June 16, 2009 Had an interesting Demo from M$ the other day & they said that with Server 2008 R2 if you buy the datacentre edition with HyperV (really cheap under Campus) you get the licences for the virtual servers FOC, so if you run 6 six virtual servers that's about £600 saved just on licences !!! The guy also said that they'll support RedHat on the linux front so I asked if that included things like CentOS that is built on RH & he said he didn't see why not. We're also looking at looking at virtualisation with no budget so OpenFiler is looking very interesting as I might be able to buy bits slowly to built up a filer box :-)
Guest monkeyx Posted June 16, 2009 Posted June 16, 2009 Had an interesting Demo from M$ the other day & they said that with Server 2008 R2 if you buy the datacentre edition with HyperV (really cheap under Campus) you get the licences for the virtual servers FOC, so if you run 6 six virtual servers that's about £600 saved just on licences !!! The guy also said that they'll support RedHat on the linux front so I asked if that included things like CentOS that is built on RH & he said he didn't see why not. We're also looking at looking at virtualisation with no budget so OpenFiler is looking very interesting as I might be able to buy bits slowly to built up a filer box :-) I would test the linux installs first (not tried R2 though) we had a nightmare getting it to work with ubuntu server and debian! It also failed some our file copy IO tests hosting Windows 2003 servers!
dezt Posted June 18, 2009 Author Posted June 18, 2009 @MonkeyX Can you PM me your server spec please, i want to compare the ones i'm looking at to yours to make sure that i'm looking at good enough servers.
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now