Anyone using vSphere for their servers in a school?

[bossman]

For the cost of getting a second (and considering your primary san might be showing age) You could probably get two devices running Open-E and have Active-Active ISCSI failover from one to the other. Meaning you can completely take a San offline and nobody will notice. Plus there is no size limit. If you want you could use the 36 bay supermicro chassis

 

7110 SAN is only 3 - 4 years old, it should last at least 10 and as long as it remains cool and maintained well it should.

 

I have looked at other HW like the SuperMicro chassis and it does look good but when you look at the cost overall and the software + firmware it leaves the same financial footprint as the 7110 which would be approx 6k.

 

We do have another SAN for our user storage which is an Hitachi SMS100 which has also served us very well indeed for the cost.

 

Its a little old and archaic but it serves the school well for the moment until we get a new school or I die hehe!

 

Whatever happens we will get a new system

[Ashm]

which negatives? and which positives? are you talking about please explain?

I think he means that there's no fault tolerance provided by RAID0, if one drive fails in the array that's the whole array gone. If it's just fast reads you require, RAID5 would prove better from a fault tolerance point of view and you'd only lose the overall capacity of one of the drives and a bit of read performance (assuming your using 3 or more disks in this array).

 

The only time I've seen RAID0 recommended is on VDI hosts where extremely fast IO is needed and there are multiple hosts for fault tolerance.

 

Very similar to @gshaw we're a VMware shop with 3 hosts running the Essentials Plus bundle with the Veeam Essentials bundle to match. Very happy with the set up.

[twin--turbo]

We are just starting dow the vm route and have install esxi and vsphere client and got things working but we thought that these products where free but we are getting 60 days warning when we run Vsphere client.

 

What parts are free to use and what are trial.

What type of price a re we looking at for a 1 physical server with 2 processers 4 cores each 16gb ram. we have the server it just the software.

We are looking at running 3-5 vm mainly smoothwall and moodle vms.

 

THanks in advance

Stuart

 

 

Log back into the vmware website.

find your esxi licence code

go to configuration tab on the hypervisor

under software > Licence Features > edit

 

Enter the code.

 

Away you go.

 

Rob

[twin--turbo]

Your Unlikely to need 8 cores and 16GB of ram for 5VM's doing that sort of work.

 

ESXi is limited to 1 CPU with up to 6 cores and 256GB of ram

 

Disks are limited to 256GB too but you can SW raid them in your OS

 

Rob

[rama1712]

Where have people bought the VMware Essentials Kit from please

 

Need to get prices with education

[mrbios]

Web server, Media Streaming etc etc where fast read is required and no writeback needed.

 

 

 

which negatives? and which positives? are you talking about please explain?

 

Please don't make statements when you don't back them up with information regarding what you are talking about.

 

You may have had issues with Raid0 but have been using it for the past 11 years for the likes of above and have not met with any problems as long as we have a good VM backup its not a problem and as I have stated when we get another SAN to replicate in a mirror we should have total failsafe.

 

We as a middle sized secondary school cannot afford to lash out vast finances on HW so we have to do the best we can with what we have and I think I have fulfilled that criteris to date.

 

Only had 5 hours of non managed downtime in 11 years which I feel is not bad for a system which over the years TOC has been less than £250,000 and still going strong.

 

I would love to spend £100,000 per annum, lucky if I get £15,000 to run all the school systems and toners come out of this for all the ICTsuites.

 

It has been a labour of love and as this is my first and probably my last job in IT within the educational system I feel I have given the students the very best value for the money I have been given.

 

Very defensive stance towards an opinion...

 

My point though was that anything held on that raid, if the array dies, you lose the lot there and then, meaning you have to go through the process of replacing the dead drive, rebuilding the array before you can think of recovering the lost data. Just one extra drive and RAID5 and you (hopefully) never have to worry about all the time you'd lose from doing the rebuild etc. It's the cost of the single extra drive vs the cost of the amount of time it takes you to rebuild and restore.

 

You're then talking about getting another SAN to mirror followed by talking about not having enough money to spend on the system? One drive = failover if an array dies, a FAR more likely occourance than the entire SAN dieing. (not that I think it's a bad idea to have two SANs mirroring each other, just questioning your logic over lack of funds and failover) Also may be worth pointing out that RAID5 with 3 disks vs RAID0 with 2 disks give you identical speed benefits for reads, you just lose the write benefit of RAID0.

[ChrisMiles]

I completely agree with mrbios, no offense intended here but the main negative with Raid 0 is it has absolutely no redundancy, so when a disk fails your webserver/media streaming etc will be down while you replace the disk, rebuild the array and restore a backup.

 

For the cost of one extra disk you can negate that downtime with a 3 disk raid 5, and since you mentioned that you use raid 0 for applications where there is no write, and high performance read is required, raid 5 is essentially raid 0 with parity so although write will be slower, with a highly read-biased environment, a 3 disk raid 5 on a decent controller will outperform a 2 disk raid 0 anyway (not equal it as mrbios stated, because the parity is distributed across all disks and so is the data, unlike raid 3/4). Adding spindles to any raid is the primary way of increasing performance.

 

Also, a 2 disk raid 0 has approx double the chance of failing in a given period of time than a single disk.

 

Basically you should use Raid 5 or 6 for predominantly read based applications such as web servers and streaming servers or file severs in general, and raid 1 or 10 for applications where write performance is important, such as databases. Obviously you can use raid 50/60 etc for added redundancy/performance but as a basic guideline I cant see any justification for ever using Raid 0 in a production environment.

 

Even if you can't afford a 3rd disk, on a decent controller, a Raid 1 array would perform better read performance than a single disk, since both disks can perform seperate reads simultaneously.

Edited November 21, 2012 by ChrisMiles

[Duke]

which negatives? and which positives? are you talking about please explain?

 

Please don't make statements when you don't back them up with information regarding what you are talking about.

 

I think the concern is that RAID0 isn't technically RAID as it fails the 'redundant' part. Most people who want speed use RAID10 (or 0+1) as that gives you the speed of RAID0 with the redundancy of RAID1 (give or take, I know it's not quite that simple as there are overheads). If you've got failover then fair enough, but doesn't having to failover your whole disk pool due to a single disk failure seem a bit excessive?

 

To each their own though, and if it's working for you then I'm certainly not criticising.

 

Chris